June 2006 - Haskell-Cafe

Haskell developer is needed
by pvainuk＠aol.com 25 Jun '06

25 Jun '06

An enthusiastic Haskell Developer with good C++ skills is needed to assist with the rollout of a new system. This is a high profile project and the successful candidate will work in a very strong business oriented team where they will gain experience in wide variety of products and systems. Essential skills include: Haskell language, C++, office technology, Windows environment. Some finance knowledge is desired, but not essential. The ideal candidate with in depth understanding of computer science basics must be passionate about Haskell. You will need a 1st class computer science degree or demonstrate sound work experience. A successful candidate must be prepared to work under the pressure in the very dynamic environment extended hours. This is an excellent opportunity for a talented developer to join a well established company with global presence and to work on the most cutting edge technologies and to really progress your career. Location: HQ, London, UK Please send your CV to pvainuk(a)aol.com

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ReadP and MonadFix
by Gracjan Polak 24 Jun '06

24 Jun '06

Hi all, A question for hot summer day: Text.ParserCombinators.ReadP.ReadP is an instance of Monad. Could it be an instance of MonadFix too? I'm not that sharp in Haskell to write it myself, but it seems I could make use of such a beast. :) Anybody willing to share? This will also present the advantage of Lazy over Eager Parser Combinators, mentioned in some other thread. -- Gracjan

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Binary IO
by jeff lasslett 24 Jun '06

24 Jun '06

Greetings, I am considering writing -in Haskell of course - a small program to translate binary files to human readable text. The trouble is that I can find no easily digestible tutorial style info on how to do binary IO in Haskell. I have read about some of the libraries that people have created to do binary IO, but the documentation wasn't sufficient to get me started (perhaps because I'm a bit dense, and also relatively new to Haskell). What I would like is to see a short example showing some code that reads from a binary file. I would also like to know what the most widely used library for doing binary IO in Haskell is. I would greatly appreciate it if someone could post a small example or two illustrating how to do binary IO in Haskell using the most widely used binary IO lib (if there is such a thing). Failing that, I would appreciate a link to some Haskell code that does binary IO that I could study. Lastly, if there is a good tutorial on doing binary IO in Haskell then I would appreciate a link to that as well. Thanks in advance, Jeff Lasslett

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newbie - IO issues (of course)
by Geoffrey King 24 Jun '06

24 Jun '06

I have been work my way through "Haskell The Craft of Functional Programming", all was fine until IO (chapter 18). That is causing me bafflement. I am trying to write a totally trivial program that reads a series of integers from the console until it gets a zero, then returns the series of integers as a list. I am down to randomly editing my code, never a good sign. Any clues would be appreciated, My code so far, which clear doesn't work, is: getInt :: IO Int getInt = do putStr "Enter number (zero to quit)" line <- getLine return (read line :: Int) anIntList :: [Int] anIntList = do let n = getInt if n == 0 then return [] else return (n : anIntList) ps: even a simple version that returns an Int i can't get to work. anInt :: Int anInt = do n <- getInt return n

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Lambda abstraction analogous to imperative pseudo-code?
by Clifford Beshers 23 Jun '06

23 Jun '06

The Wikipedia article on lambda abstractions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_abstraction) has a statement that does not resonate with me: A lambda abstraction is to a functional programming <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming> language such as Scheme <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_programming_language> what pseudo-code <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-code> is to an imperative programming <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperative_programming> language. Does anyone else find this to be a peculiar statement? If you think it is accurate, could you provide an alternate explanation and/or example to the one in the article?

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Functional programming for processing of large raster images
by oleg＠pobox.com 23 Jun '06

23 Jun '06

Recently Vo Minh Thu wondered if Haskell (or, I generalize, functional programming) can be of much use for computer graphics programming. I'd like to point out a project that experimentally shown that functional programming is of great help for processing of large raster images (24-bit PPM files). The paper describing the system has been accepted for `Science of Computer Programming' and is in press: Combining Partial Evaluation and Staged Interpretation in the Implementation of Domain-Specific Languages Christoph A. Herrmann, Tobias Langhammer The code for the system is available online http://infosun.fmi.uni-passau.de/cl/metaprog/imagefilter2-2005-10-30.tgz The previous [slightly obsolete] version of the paper, presented at the MetaOCaml'04 workshop, is available online http://www.fmi.uni-passau.de/forschung/mip-berichte/MIP-0410.html The paper includes a few pictures and the table with benchmark, so we can observe the benefits. Now, with offshoring and native MetaOCaml fully implemented, we can gain bigger benefits. In this project, functional programming does what it is probably best suited: to develop a `compiler' -- a compiler from a filter specification to quite efficient code. The code is specialized to all available static information. To be precise, the authors implement an interpreter -- which is then specialized to the source program and so interpretative overhead is removed and the code is optimized. Staging an interpreter automatically gives a compiler. Futamura projections are not only the fascinating, but useful, too.

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Functional progr., infinity, and the Universe
by voigt.16734551＠bloglines.com 23 Jun '06

23 Jun '06

--- paul.hudak(a)yale.edu wrote: voigt.16734551(a)bloglines.com wrote: > 1:_|_ is certainly finite. In what sense is it not? I see that point. I have been using "finite" as, by convention, equal to "total and finite". And so have others. As always with convention, one can argue. I won't, of course. > Sorry, see my reply to Bill Wood. Yes, saw that later. > distinguishes what are called "interesting" elements from other elements > (if I recall the terminology correctly). Interesting ;-) Ciao, Janis.

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sortBy2 for List library
by Serge D. Mechveliani 23 Jun '06

23 Jun '06

Consider the following suggestions for the standard Haskell library `List'. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ import List (intersprerse, insertBy) compose :: [a -> a] -> a -> a -- just appropriate name compose = foldr (.) id insertBy2 :: (a -> b) -> Comparison b -> a -> [a] -> [a] insertBy2 f cp a xs = map fst $ insertBy (\ p p' -> cp (snd p) (snd p')) (a, f a) [(x, f x) | x <- xs] Similar are mergeBy2, sortBy2. type ComparisonValue = LT | GT | Eq deriving ... -- better name than `Ordering' type Comparison a = a -> a -> ComparisonValue ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Motivation example for `compose': myShowsList :: Show a => [a] -> String -> String myShowsList xs = compose $ intersperse (", "++) $ map shows xs myShowsList ("; "++) [1,2,3] --> "1; 2; 3" Motivation example for insertBy2: Consider the program insertBy (\ n m -> compare (f n) (f m)) 100 [0 .. 1000], where f :: Integer -> Integer is expensive to compute. We see that the program insertBy2 f compare 100 [1 .. 1000] spends 2 times less of `f' invocations, and looks natural. ----------------- Serge Mechveliani mechvel(a)botik.ru

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Polymorphic type
by Sara Kenedy 22 Jun '06

22 Jun '06

Hello all, Now I am trying with the function of polymorphic type: This function returns the Nth element of list with type a. I try it as below. getNthElem :: Int -> [a] -> Maybe a getNthElemt _ [] = Nothing getNthElem 0 _ = Nothing getNthElem n s | n > length s = Nothing | otherwise = Just ((drop (n-1) (take n s))!!0) >getNthElem 2 ["a","b","c"] Just "b" However, I do not satisfy with this function because I want to return the Nth element of type a, not (Maybe a). For example, I want this function: getNthElem :: Int -> [a] -> a But, I do not know how to define the empty element of type a. getNthElemt _ [] = ???? getNthElem 0 _ = ???? If you have some ideas about this, please give me some clues. Thanks a lot. S.

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neural network code
by John Meacham 22 Jun '06

22 Jun '06

I was curious if there was any code floating around out there for dealing with neural networks in haskell? John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈

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