Some housekeeping and more reading
B. Pierce and M. Jones both answered Philip Wadler's request for a simple typing algorithm. Jones pointed to his article 'A polymorphic Type System for Extensible Records and Variants' that describes an implementation for his 1994 type system. After reading it, I don't believe it is simpler than other systems. Pierce proposed to read the last chapter in a book he just published. The chapter is written by D. Rémy and should give an somewhat easy introduction to state-of-the-art typing systems. It is very long and I didn't have time to read it yet. I am slightly sceptical that I will find a simple, easy, type inference algorithm for records in there. I suspect it will mostly be a rewrite of Rémy's and other's already published algorithms. I am waiting for an answer of the 'Kleisli bunch' about their type system. I hope this one will actually really be simpler.
I also spent quite a lot of time today doing 'housekeeping' tasks: classifying articles, reinstalling and relearning LaTeX, etc. It is scary how fast one forgets LaTeX when not using it for a little while.