October 2007 - Haskell-Cafe

Cannot understand liftM2
by Nicola Paolucci 13 Feb '12

13 Feb '12

Hi All, I'm loving learning Haskell quite a bit. It is stretching my brain but in a delightfull way. I've googled, I've hoogled but I haven't found a clear explanation for what exactly liftM2 does in the context below. Using the cool lambdabot "pointless" utility I found out that: > \x -> snd(x) - fst(x) is the same as: > liftM2 (-) snd fst I like the elegance of this but I cannot reconcile it with its type. I can't understand it. I check the signature of liftM2 and I get: Prelude> :t liftM2 Prelude> liftM2 :: (Monad m) => (a1 -> a2 -> r) -> m a1 -> m a2 -> m r Can someone help me understand what's happening here ? What does a Monad have to do with a simple subtraction ? What is actually the "m" of my example ? I am sure if I get this I'll be another step closer to illumination ... Thanks, Nick

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Re: Code and Perf. Data for Prime Finders (was: Genuine Eratosthenes sieve)
by Dave Bayer 29 Dec '09

29 Dec '09

Here is another prime sieve. It is about half the length of the fastest contributed code (ONeillPrimes) and nearly as fast until it blows up on garbage collection: > % cat ONeillPrimes.hs | grep -v "^--" | wc > 185 1105 6306 > % cat BayerPrimes.hs | grep -v "^--" | wc > 85 566 2418 > > [Integer] -O 1*10^6 2*10^6 3*10^6 4*10^6 5*10^6 > --------------------------------------------------------- > ONeillPrimes | 3.555 | 7.798 | 12.622 | 18.927 | 23.529 > BayerPrimes | 3.999 | 8.895 | 18.003 | 22.977 | 38.053 I wrote this as an experiment in coding data structures in Haskell's lazy evaluation model, rather than as explicit data. The majority of the work done by this code is done by "merge"; the multiples of each prime percolate up through a tournament consisting of a balanced tree of suspended "merge" function calls. In order to create an infinite lazy balanced tree of lists, the datatype > data List a = A a (List a) | B [a] is used as scaffolding. One thinks of the root of the infinite tree as starting at the leftmost child, and crawling up the left spine as necessary. What I'm calling a "venturi" > venturi :: Ord a => [[a]] -> [a] merges an infinite list of infinite lists into one list, under the assumption that each list, and the heads of the lists, are in increasing order. This could be a generally useful function. If one can think of a better way to write "venturi", swapping in your code would in particular yield a faster prime sieve. I found that a tertiary merge tree was faster than a binary merge tree, because this leads to fewer suspensions. One can speed this code up a bit by interleaving strict and lazy calls, but I prefer to leave the code short and readable. It is bizarre that > trim p = let f m x = mod x m /= 0 in filter (f p) lurks in the prime sieve code, but it is only used with primes of size up to the square root of the largest output prime. I tried more thoughtful alternatives, and they all slowed down the sieve. Sometimes dumb is beautiful. Thanks to apfelmus for various helpful remarks that lead me to think of this approach. Here is the code: > module BayerPrimes (venturi,primes) where > > -- Code for venturi :: Ord a => [[a]] -> [a] > > merge :: Ord a => [a] -> [a] -> [a] -> [a] > merge xs@(x:xt) ys@(y:yt) zs@(z:zt) > | x <= y = if x <= z > then x : (merge xt ys zs) > else z : (merge xs ys zt) > | otherwise = if y <= z > then y : (merge xs yt zs) > else z : (merge xs ys zt) > merge _ _ _ = undefined > > data List a = A a (List a) | B [a] > > mergeA :: Ord a => List a -> List a -> List a -> List a > mergeA (A x xt) ys zs = A x (mergeA xt ys zs) > mergeA (B xs) ys zs = mergeB xs ys zs > > mergeB :: Ord a => [a] -> List a -> List a -> List a > mergeB xs@(x:xt) ys@(A y yt) zs = case compare x y of > LT -> A x (mergeB xt ys zs) > EQ -> A x (mergeB xt yt zs) > GT -> A y (mergeB xs yt zs) > mergeB xs (B ys) zs = mergeC xs ys zs > mergeB _ _ _ = undefined > > mergeC :: Ord a => [a] -> [a] -> List a -> List a > mergeC xs@(x:xt) ys@(y:yt) zs@(A z zt) > | x < y = if x < z > then A x (mergeC xt ys zs) > else A z (mergeC xs ys zt) > | otherwise = if y < z > then A y (mergeC xs yt zs) > else A z (mergeC xs ys zt) > mergeC xs ys (B zs) = B $ merge xs ys zs > mergeC _ _ _ = undefined > > root :: Ord a => List a -> [List a] -> [a] > root (A x xt) yss = x : (root xt yss) > root (B xs) (ys:zs:yst) = root (mergeB xs ys zs) yst > root _ _ = undefined > > wrap :: [a] -> List a > wrap [] = B [] > wrap (x:xt) = A x $ B xt > > triple :: Ord a => [List a] -> [List a] > triple (x:y:z:xs) = mergeA x y z : (triple xs) > triple _ = undefined > > group :: Ord a => [List a] -> [List a] > group (x:y:xt) = x : y : (group $ triple xt) > group _ = undefined > > venturi :: Ord a => [[a]] -> [a] > venturi (x:xt) = root (wrap x) $ group $ map wrap xt > venturi _ = undefined > > -- Code for primes :: Integral a => [a] > > diff :: Ord a => [a] -> [a] -> [a] > diff xs@(x:xt) ys@(y:yt) = case compare x y of > LT -> x : (diff xt ys) > EQ -> (diff xt yt) > GT -> (diff xs yt) > diff _ _ = undefined > > trim :: Integral a => a -> [a] -> [a] > trim p = let f m x = mod x m /= 0 in filter (f p) > > seed :: Integral a => [a] > seed = [2,3,5,7,11,13,17] > > wheel :: Integral a => [a] > wheel = drop 1 [ m*j + k | j <- [0..], k <- ws ] > where m = foldr1 (*) seed > ws = foldr trim [1..m] seed > > multiples :: Integral a => [a] -> [[a]] > multiples ws = map fst $ tail $ iterate g ([], ws) > where g (_,ps@(p:pt)) = ([ m*p | m <- ps ], trim p pt) > g _ = undefined > > primes :: Integral a => [a] > primes = seed ++ (diff wheel $ venturi $ multiples wheel)

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HDBC or HSQL
by George Moschovitis 19 Oct '08

19 Oct '08

Dear devs, I am a Haskell newbie and I would like to hear your suggestions regarding a Database conectivity library: HSQL or HDBC ? which one is better / more actively supported? thanks in advance, -g. -- http://phidz.com http://blog.gmosx.com http://cull.gr http://www.joy.gr http://nitroproject.org

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External Sort and unsafeInterleaveIO
by Ben 11 Oct '08

11 Oct '08

hi folks -- a haskell newbie here, searching for comments and wisdom on my code. i had a project to try to implement "external sort" in haskell as a learning exercise. (external sort is sorting a list that is too large to fit in main memory, by sorting in chunks, spooling to disk, and then merging. more properly there probably should be multiple stages, but for simplicity i'm doing a one-stage external sort.) the trick is the number of files can quickly grow very large, so it is best to use one large file and seek inside it around. however as one can imagine the order-of-IO-operations becomes a bit tricky, if you're seeking file handles around underneath Data.ByteString.Lazy's nose. but late this night after not thinking about it for a while i had a brainstorm: rewrite hGetContents to keep the handle position in the right place! it's all about judicious use of unsafeInterleaveIO..... it seems to be rather fast, strangely faster than the usual "sort" at times. it also seems to have nice memory characteristics, though not perfect. it's hard to test because the normal "sort" function takes too much RAM on large lists, making my computer swap like mad. i'd appreciate any testing, comments and suggestions from the haskell gods out there. my thanks to the Data.ByteString.Lazy, Data.Binary, and Data.Edison people, who made this rather easy, once I grokked unsafeInterleaveIO. thanks and take care, B > module ExternalSort where Sort a list of Ords "offline." We're doing this to be able to sort things without taking up too much memory (for example sorting lists too large to fit in RAM.) Laziness is imperative, as is the order-of-operations. > import Control.Monad > import Data.List > import qualified Data.Binary as Bin > import qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy as B > import qualified Data.ByteString as P (hGetNonBlocking, null) > import Data.ByteString.Base (LazyByteString(LPS)) > import Foreign.Storable (sizeOf) > import System.IO (openFile, hClose, hSeek, hTell, hIsEOF, hWaitForInput, > Handle, IOMode(ReadMode, WriteMode), > SeekMode(AbsoluteSeek)) > import System.IO.Unsafe (unsafeInterleaveIO) > > import qualified Data.Edison.Seq.ListSeq as LS > import qualified Data.Edison.Coll.SplayHeap as Splay Conceptually, we sort a list in blocks, spool blocks to disk, then merge back. However for IO performance it is better to read off chunks of elements off the sorted blocks from disk instead of elements-at-a-time. It would be better if these were in KBytes instead of # of elements. > blocksize :: Int > blocksize = 10000 Turn a list into a list of chunks. > slice :: Int -> [a] -> [[a]] > slice _ [] = [] > slice size l = (take size l) : (slice size $ drop size l) Turn a list into a list of blocks, each of which is sorted. > blockify :: (Ord a) => Int -> [a] -> [[a]] > blockify bsize l = map sort $ slice bsize l Serialize a block, returning the (absolute) position of the start. > dumpBlock :: (Ord a, Bin.Binary a) => Handle -> [a] -> IO Integer > dumpBlock h b = do > start <- hTell h > B.hPut h $ Bin.encode b > return start The actual sorting function. We blockify the list, turning it into a list of sorted blocks, and spool to disk, keeping track of offsets. We then read back the blocks (lazily!), and merge them. > externalSort [] = do return [] > externalSort l = do > h <- openFile "ExternalSort.bin" WriteMode > idx <- mapM (\x -> dumpBlock h x) (blockify blocksize l) > hClose h > h <- openFile "ExternalSort.bin" ReadMode > blocks <- mapM (\x -> do {bs <- hGetContentsWithCursor h x; > return $ Bin.decode bs}) idx > return (kMerge $ blocks) Merging chunks. K-way merge (and in fact external sort in general) is detailed in Knuth, where he recommends tournament trees. The easiest thing is to probably use one of Okasaki's heaps. I'll use splay heaps, because I don't know any better. It would be better if I changed Ord for blocks to only check the first element. > kMerge :: (Ord a) => [[a]] -> [a] > kMerge [] = [] > kMerge l = > let h = Splay.fromSeq l in > kM (Splay.minElem h) (Splay.deleteMin h) > where > kM :: (Ord a) => [a] -> Splay.Heap [a] -> [a] > kM l h > | h == Splay.empty = l > | otherwise = > let next = Splay.minElem h > (f, b) = span (\x -> x <= head next) l > in > f ++ (kM next (if null b then Splay.deleteMin h > else (Splay.insert b $ Splay.deleteMin h))) > > kMergeSort :: (Ord a) => [a] -> [a] > kMergeSort l = kMerge $ blockify blocksize l This is a version of hGetContents which resets its handle position between reads, so is safe to use with interleaved handle seeking. > hGetContentsWithCursor :: Handle -> Integer -> IO B.ByteString > hGetContentsWithCursor = hGetContentsWithCursorN defaultChunkSize > > hGetContentsWithCursorN :: Int -> Handle -> Integer -> IO B.ByteString > hGetContentsWithCursorN k h start = (lazyRead start) >>= return . LPS > where > lazyRead start = unsafeInterleaveIO $ loop start > > loop start = do > hSeek h AbsoluteSeek start > ps <- P.hGetNonBlocking h k > --TODO: I think this should distinguish EOF from no data available > -- the otherlying POSIX call makes this distincion, returning either > -- 0 or EAGAIN > if P.null ps > then do eof <- hIsEOF h > if eof then return [] > else hWaitForInput h (-1) > >> (loop start) > else do > pos <- hTell h > pss <- lazyRead pos > return (ps : pss) > > defaultChunkSize :: Int > defaultChunkSize = 32 * k - overhead > where k = 1024 > overhead = 2 * sizeOf (undefined :: Int)

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Old editions of The Monad.Reader lost
by Henk-Jan van Tuyl 10 May '08

10 May '08

L.S., Now that all hawiki pages have been removed, we have lost some valuable information. For example The Monad.Reader; on http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/The_Monad.Reader it says: Older editions can be found on the old Haskell wiki – they haven't been included here for licensing reasons. The page it links to, a hawiki page, has dissappeared. I propose to bring at least the The Monad.Reader pages back. Backups of these pages can be found at the Wayback Machine, but there is no guarantee that will always be there. -- Met vriendelijke groet, Henk-Jan van Tuyl -- http://functor.bamikanarie.com http://Van.Tuyl.eu/ --

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Separate a string into a list of strings
by Sara Kenedy 18 Apr '08

18 Apr '08

Hi all, I want to write a function to separate a string into a list of strings separated by commas. Example: separate :: String -> [String] separate "Haskell, Haskell, and Haskell" = ["Haskell", "Haskell", "and Haskell"] If anyone has some ideas, please share with me. Thanks. S.

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Export Haskell Libraries
by SevenThunders 12 Feb '08

12 Feb '08

I've finished a good sized Haskell project which I now must expose as a library (along with a lot of C code) to my fellow engineers. I had originally devoped my code on Windows XP and managed to learn how to wrap my Haskell code in a DLL and create an MSVC linkable library stub for the DLL. Although involved, the output in windows is relatively transparent in that as long as the paths are available to the Haskell runtime libraries and my DLL, linking is straightforward. Now however I find I must export the same libraries to linux. I decided to get 'smart' and repackage my build tools using CMAKE and cabal. Building the C object files is no problem and even configuring Cabal to generate my executables is not too painful. However the pain begins when one tries to link any Haskell object files or libraries to an external C program. Using ghc -v during the build reveals that gcc has about 50 -u flag arguments and links to 9 or 10 different libraries. Given that my little component is just a tiny part of a large software project involving many more engineers and many man years of work, it's not going to be fun to link my little library using all these crazy build flags to a large external project, especially when order is important. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a single run time library I could link to, (or even generate on the fly) that didn't have this intricate build step. How is ghc/Haskell supposed to integrate with the rest of the software world? A related issue in the building of my export libraries is cabal itself. I want to package my own library with some external object files etc and some Haskell code. It's easily done with ar and the correct object files. Unfortunately it is not clear from the documentation how I can force cabal to place the object files and generated stub files in a place where I can use them. (CMake is kind of forcing me to have them reside with the source for reasons I don't want to go into here.) I instead find myself copying the object files (*.o) back into the source directory from an obscure tmp directory several layers down from the source directory. This is not particularly portable and is probably quite fragile once someone decides to change the directory hiearcharchy in cabal. I guess I am surprised that on linux, with all of it's amazing software development tools, that Haskell export libraries would be this tricky to develop. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Export-Haskell-Libraries-tf3569747.html#a9972866 Sent from the Haskell - Haskell-Cafe mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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viewing HS files in Firefox
by Isaac Dupree 10 Jan '08

10 Jan '08

When I try to go to one of the Module.hs files, e.g. on darcs.haskell.org, it now has type HS and Firefox refuses to display it (and only lets me download it). Does anyone know how to make Firefox treat certain file types as others (HS as plain text, in particular)? so that I can browse them with any convenience Thanks, Isaac

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New slogan for haskell.org
by Don Stewart 06 Dec '07

06 Dec '07

It was raised at CUFP today that while Python has: Python is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development. It offers strong support for integration with other languages and tools, comes with extensive standard libraries, and can be learned in a few days. Many Python programmers report substantial productivity gains and feel the language encourages the development of higher quality, more maintainable code. With the links from the start about using Python for various purposes, along with reassuring text about licenses and so on. Note its all about how it can help you. The Haskell website has the rather strange motivational text: Haskell is a general purpose, purely functional programming language featuring static typing, higher order functions, polymorphism, type classes, and monadic effects. Haskell compilers are freely available for almost any computer. Which doesn't say why these help you. Any suggestions on a 2 or 3 sentence spiel about what's available? Here's some quick points: General purpose: applications from OS kernels to compilers to web dev to ... Strong integration with other languages: FFI, and FFI binding tools Many developer tools: debugger, profiler, code coverage, QuickCheck Extensive libraries: central library repository, central repo hosting Productivity, robustness, maintainability: purity, type system, etc Parallelism! -- Don

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will the real quicksort please stand up? (or: sorting a > million element list)
by Thomas Hartman 20 Nov '07

20 Nov '07

It has been noted in a few places that the 2 line quicksort demo in the Introduction section of the haskell wiki http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction isn't a "real" quicksort, and wouldn't scale well with longer lists. Interested, and wanting to put my recently learned test data generating skills to the test, I put this to the test with a little suite for various versions of quickcheck I found lying around. My patience extends to <3 minutes for waiting for a result, which for my tests was about the amount needed for a million integer long list. This was definitely faster for the "treesort" below than the naive quicksort from the wiki. (Prelude sort, which I think is mergesort, just blew the stack.) I wonder if there are "tricks" or lore that could be applied to get better results or insight. t. {-import Control.Monad (when) import Control.Monad.ST import Data.Array.ST import Data.Array.IArray import Data.Array.MArray import System.IO.Unsafe import Control.Monad -} import Test.QuickCheck hiding (test) import System.Random import Data.List {- $ time ghci -e 'test treesort 6' quicksort.hs # a "real" quicksort, according to roconnor 1000000 real 2m18.702s user 1m3.296s sys 0m0.453s $ time ghci -e 'test qs1 6' quicksort.hs # "naive" (from the wiki intro to haskell, not a "real" quicksort 1000000 real 4m18.174s user 1m57.615s sys 0m0.665s $ time ghci -e 'test sort 6' quicksort.hs # mergesort from the prelude *** Exception: stack overflow real 0m13.634s user 0m3.805s sys 0m0.446s hartthoma@linuxpt:~/ProjectRepos/learning/quicksort> -} -- For interactive development, I wound up working in hugs +S +I, -- because ghci in emacs tended to lock up -- hugs just segfaults, but at least the computer doesn't lock. -- by the way, is there a way to get ghci to behave similarly to hugs? (restricted memory mode?) -- t1 and t2 are about the same speed for n = 4, got bored of waiting for n great. -- naive, "not really" quicksort according to recent reddit discussion. test sortf n = genlist n >>= return . ( length . sortf ) -- naive qs1 [] = [] qs1 (x:xs) = qs1 (filter (< x) xs) ++ [x] ++ qs1 (filter (>= x) xs) -- roconnor claims that "real" quicksort in haskell is really treesort. -- from http://programming.reddit.com/info/2h0j2/comments --I'm talking about a deforested version of tree sort. In tree sort you build a binary search tree by adding the head of the list to the root of the tree, and then building binary search trees for those items less than the root, and those items greater than the root. qs2 l = treeSort l treeSort l = foldTree (\x lft rht -> lft++[x]++rht) [] (mkTree l) -- After building the search tree, it is turned into a list by folding \x lft rht -> lft++[x]++rht. foldTree f g Leaf = g foldTree f g (Node x l r) = f x (foldTree f g l) (foldTree f g r) mkTree [] = Leaf mkTree (x:xs) = Node x (mkTree (filter (<= x) xs)) (mkTree (filter (x <) xs)) -- If you deforest this algorithm (removing the intermediate tree structure) you are left with -- treeSort' [] = [] -- treeSort' (x:xs) = treeSort' (filter (<= x) xs) ++ [x] ++ treeSort' (filter (x <) xs) -- for testing genlist n = rgen ( vector $ 10^n ) :: IO [Int] rgenIntList = rgen (arbitrary :: Gen [Int]) :: IO [Int] rgen gen = do sg <- newStdGen return $ generate 10000 sg gen data Tree a = Leaf | Node a (Tree a) (Tree a) --- This e-mail may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient (or have received this e-mail in error) please notify the sender immediately and destroy this e-mail. Any unauthorized copying, disclosure or distribution of the material in this e-mail is strictly forbidden.

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