- Beginners - Haskell.org

Arrow
by Luca Ciciriello 30 May '10

30 May '10

Hi All. As a mathematician I've studied the Arrows calculus as extension of the lambda calculus. Now I've found in the Haskell programming language that there is a library named Control.Arrow. I've read on Haskell wiki that Control.Arrow is a generalization of monads. So, is that library related in same way with the Arrows calculus? Thanks in advance for any answer. Luca.

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forall confusion
by Philip Scott 30 May '10

30 May '10

Hi all, I was wondering if someone could give me an intuitive explanation of why in f :: forall a.(Show a) => a -> String f x = show x "forall a.(Show a) => a" appears to translate into "Any a, as long as it is an instance of Show" but if I use forall in an type qualifier in an assignment: myList = [] :: [forall a.(Show a) => a] "forall a.(Show a) => a" seems to mean "Any a, as long as it is bottom" I've been poring over http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Existentially_quantified_types for the last hour and I feel like my eyes are starting to melt. As usual, any input would be warmly received :) All the best, Philip

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ANNOUNCE : leksah 0.8.0.6 rpms for Fedora 13 now available
by Lakshmi Narasimhan T V 28 May '10

28 May '10

Hello, Following the official release of Leksah 0.8, rpms for Fedora 12 and Fedora 13 platforms are now available.. Before proceeding to install, remove any previous installations of leksah done via yum using the following command yum remove leksah leksah-server *Instructions for Fedora 12* *For x86* http://sites.google.com/site/lakshminaras2002/home/leksah-server-0.8.0.6-1.… http://sites.google.com/site/lakshminaras2002/home/leksah-0.8.0.6-1.fc12.i3… To install, use the following command yum --nogpgcheck install leksah-server-0.8.0.6-1.fc12.i386.rpm leksah-0.8.0.6-1.fc12.i386.rpm *For x86_64* http://sites.google.com/site/lakshminaras2002/home/leksah-server-0.8.0.6-1.… http://sites.google.com/site/lakshminaras2002/home/leksah-0.8.0.6-1.fc12.x8… To install, use the following command yum --nogpgcheck install leksah-server-0.8.0.6-1.fc12.x86_64.rpm leksah-0.8.0.6-1.fc12.x86_64.rpm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Instructions for Fedora 13* *For x86* http://sites.google.com/site/lakshminaras2002/home/leksah-0.8.0.6-1.f13.i68… http://sites.google.com/site/lakshminaras2002/home/leksah-server-0.8.0.6-1.… To install, use the following command yum --nogpgcheck install leksah-0.8.0.6-1.f13.i686.rpm leksah-server-0.8.0.6-1.f13.i686.rpm *For x86_64* http://sites.google.com/site/lakshminaras2002/home/leksah-server-0.8.0.6-1.… http://sites.google.com/site/lakshminaras2002/home/leksah-0.8.0.6-1.f13.x86… To install, use the following command yum --nogpgcheck install leksah-0.8.0.6-1.f13.x86_64.rpm leksah-server-0.8.0.6-1.f13.x86_64.rpm Thanks, -- Regards Lakshmi Narasimhan T V

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Attribute Grammar and Type signature with Happy
by Julien Lange 28 May '10

28 May '10

Hi all, I am working with a "home-made" language, with a rather big grammar, for which I've made a parser with Happy. I am now trying to use attributes as I'd like to add several typecheck-like rules directly in the grammar. My problem is that as soon as I add attributes to my grammar, the type signatures of the rules seem to be wrong. Happy indeed produces a Haskell file, but GHC complains when I try to compile. *Is it possible to use type signatures with attribute grammar at all, if so, what kind of type is legit?* (I tried to use my grammar without type signature but GHC went mental and I had to kill -9 it.) I attached an example, abc.y (adapted from the Happy ones) which behaves as my grammar. I would like to know what I should put in place of the "????". Say, if I give "[Char]" as type for the first rule, GHC says: -------------------------------------- bc.hs:63:4: The lambda expression `\ happyInhAttrs -> ...' has one argument, but its type `[Char]' has none In the first argument of `HappyAbsSyn4', namely `(\ happyInhAttrs -> let happySelfAttrs = ... (happyConditions_1, happySubAttrs_1) = happy_var_1 happyEmptyAttrs .... in (happyConditions, happySelfAttrs))' (...) skip skip (...) abc.hs:141:54: Couldn't match expected type `Attrs a -> (t, t1)' against inferred type `[Char]' In the expression: f happyEmptyAttrs In a pattern binding: (conds, attrs) = f happyEmptyAttrs In the expression: let f = do_parse toks (conds, attrs) = f happyEmptyAttrs x = foldr seq attrs conds in (value x) -------------------------------------- While, when I remove the type (i.e. ":: {[Char]}"), everything works fine and the parse function is typed as "[Char] -> [Char]". Oh, and I use: - ghc-6.8.2 - happy 1.17 Many thanks, Julien. -- Julien Lange, Graduate Teaching Assistant, PhD Student ----------------------------------------------------- Department of Computer Science, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH. T: +44 (0)116 252 3904 http://www.cs.le.ac.uk/people/jl250/ ----------------------------------------------------- { module ABCParser where } %tokentype { Char } %token a { 'a' } %token b { 'b' } %token c { 'c' } %token newline { '\n' } %attributetype { Attrs a } %attribute value { a } %attribute len { Int } %name parse abcstring %% abcstring : alist blist clist newline { $$ = $1 ++ $2 ++ $3 ; $2.len = $1.len ; $3.len = $1.len } alist : a alist { $$ = $1 : $2 ; $$.len = $2.len + 1 } | { $$ = []; $$.len = 0 } blist : b blist { $$ = $1 : $2 ; $2.len = $$.len - 1 } | { $$ = [] ; where failUnless ($$.len == 0) "blist wrong length" } clist : c clist { $$ = $1 : $2 ; $2.len = $$.len - 1 } | { $$ = [] ; where failUnless ($$.len == 0) "clist wrong length" } { happyError = error "parse error" failUnless b msg = if b then () else error msg }

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ANNOUNCE: Haskell Communities and Activities Report (18th ed., May 2010)
by Janis Voigtländer 28 May '10

28 May '10

On behalf of the many, many contributors, I am pleased to announce that the Haskell Communities and Activities Report (18th edition, May 2010) is now available in PDF and HTML formats: http://haskell.org/communities/05-2010/report.pdf http://haskell.org/communities/05-2010/html/report.html Many thanks go to all the people that contributed to this report, both directly, by sending in descriptions, and indirectly, by doing all the interesting things that are reported. I hope you will find it as interesting a read as I did. If you have not encountered the Haskell Communities and Activities Reports before, you may like to know that the first of these reports was published in November 2001. Their goal is to improve the communication between the increasingly diverse groups, projects, and individuals working on, with, or inspired by Haskell. The idea behind these reports is simple: Every six months, a call goes out to all of you enjoying Haskell to contribute brief summaries of your own area of work. Many of you respond (eagerly, unprompted, and sometimes in time for the actual deadline ;-) to the call. The editor collects all the contributions into a single report and feeds that back to the community. When I try for the next update, six months from now, you might want to report on your own work, project, research area or group as well. So, please put the following into your diaries now: ---------------------------------------- End of October 2010: target deadline for contributions to the November 2010 edition of the HC&A Report ---------------------------------------- Unfortunately, many Haskellers working on interesting projects are so busy with their work that they seem to have lost the time to follow the Haskell related mailing lists and newsgroups, and have trouble even finding time to report on their work. If you are a member, user or friend of a project so burdened, please find someone willing to make time to report and ask them to "register" with the editor for a simple e-mail reminder in October (you could point me to them as well, and I can then politely ask if they want to contribute, but it might work better if you do the initial asking). Of course, they will still have to find the ten to fifteen minutes to draw up their report, but maybe we can increase our coverage of all that is going on in the community. Feel free to circulate this announcement further in order to reach people who might otherwise not see it. Enjoy! Janis Voigtlaender <hcar at haskell.org>

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Removing the biggest element from a list - maybe slow?
by Nathan Huesken 25 May '10

25 May '10

Hi, I want to remove the biggest element from a list: withoutBiggest (x:xs) = withoutBiggestImpl (biggest x xs) [] (x:xs) where biggest :: (Ord a) => a -> [a] -> a biggest big [] = big biggest big (x:xs) = if x > big then biggest x xs else biggest big xs withoutBiggestImpl :: (Eq a) => a -> [a] -> [a] -> [a] withoutBiggestImpl big before (x:xs) = if big == x then before ++ xs else withoutBiggestImpl big (before ++ [x]) xs Works, but I am a little concerned that this is slower than needed, because the list has to be iterated twice. Can this be done faster? Regards, Nathan

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Why does this Ord-class instance crash?
by R J 22 May '10

22 May '10

I'm trying to declare Triangle as an instance of the Ord class without using "deriving (Ord)", so I can better understand the manual instantiation. As I understand it, all I need merely to define "<". Yet, when I do so using the code snippet below, this code hangs when I type "Scalene > Failure" in GHCi. Why is that, and what's the fix? Thanks. data Triangle = Failure | Equilateral | Isosceles | Scalene deriving (Eq, Show) instance Ord Triangle where Failure < Failure = False Failure < _ = True Equilateral < Failure = False Equilateral < Equilateral = False Equilateral < _ = True Isosceles < Scalene = True Isosceles < _ = False Scalene < _ = False _________________________________________________________________ The New Busy is not the old busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox. http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:…

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QuickCheck properties on monadic values
by Ashish Agarwal 21 May '10

21 May '10

I've been using the binary library, and would like to test whether my put and get functions are inverses. I thought of using QuickCheck but it is not clear how I can write the necessary property. I skimmed Claessen, Hughes, "Testing monadic code with QuickCheck", but their examples require a lot of extra work (e.g. their queue example requires an AST for a mini-queue language). Am I missing something obvious? Also, what's the difference between QuickCheck 1 and 2? I'm on gch 6.10 and doing `cabal install QuickCheck` gives me version 1.2.0.0, which lacks constructs described in the above paper. Thanks.

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Bit Manipulation
by Daniel Rozycki 21 May '10

21 May '10

Hi all, I am a newcomer to Haskell trying to manipulate data at the bit level. More specifically, I am trying to calculate a seven-bit value and a nine-bit value, concatenate the two values as a Word16, and put the result using putWord16. I know that this sounds weird (because it totally is), but it is required by the standard of a networking protocol that I am implementing. The byte seems to be the atomic unit in Haskell, but I need to go subatomic. Currently, I am storing the two values each as Word16s, bitshifting one of them left by nine (using shift in the Data.Bits module), and then adding the two. Is there a simpler and/or more elegant way of achieving this result? Thanks, Dan Rozycki

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class and instance question
by Walck, Scott 20 May '10

20 May '10

Hi folks, I'm trying to make doubles and triples act like vectors, as in (3,4) <+> (7,8) ==> (10,12) (3,2,1) <+> (9,8,7) ==> (12,10,8) 6 *> (1,2,3) ==> (6,12,18) I thought I should make a type class so that I could use <+> for both double addition and triple addition, and *> for both double and triple scalar multiplication. (Some of this functionality is provided by NumericPrelude, but I didn't need all of that, and I hoped this would be simple to write.) The code below gives the error NewVectorShort.hs:19:0: Type synonym `Vector2D' should have 1 argument, but has been given 0 In the instance declaration for `BasicVector Vector2D' Failed, modules loaded: none. I don't understand how what I'm trying to do is different from, say, the Monad instance for Maybe. (Maybe a) is a type, and (Vector2D a) is a type. Thanks, Scott {-# LANGUAGE TypeSynonymInstances #-} infixl 6 <+> infixl 6 <-> infixl 7 *> infixl 7 <* class BasicVector v where (<+>) :: v a -> v a -> v a (<->) :: v a -> v a -> v a (*>) :: Num a => a -> v a -> v a (<*) :: Num a => v a -> a -> v a v1 <-> v2 = v1 <+> fromInteger (-1) *> v2 v1 <* c = c *> v1 c *> v1 = v1 <* c type Vector2D a = (a,a) instance BasicVector Vector2D where (ax,ay) <+> (bx,by) = (ax+bx,ay+by) c *> (ax,ay) = (c*ax,c*ay)

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