May 2007 - Haskell-Cafe

Cannot understand liftM2
by Nicola Paolucci 14 Feb '12

14 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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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 13 Feb '08

13 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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ANN: FileManip 0.1, an expressive file manipulation library
by Bryan O'Sullivan 09 Nov '07

09 Nov '07

The FileManip package provides expressive functions and combinators for searching, matching, and manipulating files. It provides three modules. System.FilePath.Find lets you search a filesystem hierarchy efficiently: find always (extension ==? ".rb") >>= mapM_ remove System.FilePath.GlobPattern lets you perform glob-style pattern matching, without going through a regexp engine: "foo.c" ~~ "*.c" ==> True System.FilePath.Manip lets you rename files procedurally, edit files in place, or save old copies as backups: modifyWithBackup (<.> "bak") (unlines . map (takeWhile (/= ',')) . lines) "myPoorFile.csv"

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speeding up fibonacci with memoizing
by Thomas Hartman 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

I just thought this was interesting, so I would share it. Thanks to whoever it was on #haskell who helped me, sorry I can't remember who. -- horribly slow. try slow_fibs 30, not too much higher than that and it hangs slow_fibs = map slow_fib [1..] slow_fib 1 = 1 slow_fib 2 = 1 slow_fib n = ( slow_fib (n-2) ) + (slow_fib(n-1)) -- versus, try memoized_fibs !! 10000 memoized_fibs = map memoized_fib [1..] memoized_fib = ((map fib' [0 ..]) !!) where fib' 0 = 0 fib' 1 = 1 fib' n = memoized_fib (n - 1) + memoized_fib (n - 2)

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Converting CTime -> Int
by Rob Hoelz 26 Aug '07

26 Aug '07

Hello everyone, I'm writing an interface to C code, and one of the functions I'm wrapping returns time_t. I see that this maps to CTime in Foreign.C.Types, but I can't figure out how to convert it to an Int (or any other useful Haskell type, for that matter) for the life of me. I've poured over the standard library docs, but to no avail. Could someone give me a hint? Thanks, Rob Hoelz

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Optimising UTF8-CString -> String marshaling, plus comments on withCStringLen/peekCStringLen
by Alistair Bayley 24 Jul '07

24 Jul '07

Hello cafe, D'ya fancy an optimisation exercise? In Takusen we currently marshal UTF8-encoded CStrings by first turning the CString into [word8], and then running this through a [Word8] -> String UTF8 decoder. We thought it would be more space-efficient (and hopefully faster) to marshal directly from the CString buffer, rather than use an intermediate list. We assumed it would be most space-efficient by working backwards from the end of the CString buffer, like the peekArray/peekArray0 functions in Foreign.Marshal.Array. So I implemented it and benchmarked against the original UTF8 marshaling function, which simply converts CString -> [Word] -> String. And to my surprise, the [Word8] -> String solution seems to be faster, and uses less memory, than the function which creates the String directly from the CString buffer. Now I appreciate that GHC's optimisations are quite effective (presumably deforestation should take credit here), but I thought I'd ask the haskell-cafe optimiser if we could do better with the direct-from-buffer function. I'm loath to start eyeballing GHC Core, but if needs must... The code is attached. I also have some comments/questions about the various CStringLen functions in Foreign.C.String. The Haddock comment for CStringLen states: "A string with explicit length information in bytes..." and for CWString something similar: "A wide character string with explicit length information in bytes..." I know this is a blatant lie, though, because the code (unless I've grossly misunderstood it) for newCStringLen, withStringLen, newCWStringLen, and withCWStringLen all return the number of Haskell Chars in the String i.e. the number of Unicode chars, NOT the number of bytes. However, for the sake of inconsistency, the peekC{W}StringLen functions take, respectively, the number of Word8 or Word16/Word32 elements (whether CWString is Word16 or Word32 depends on your plaform, apparently) in the C{W}String array/buffer. So the outputs from newCStringLen etc are not reliably usable as inputs to their duals (peekCStringLen etc.) The only cases that they do work in this way is where the CStrings are encoded with fixed-width encodings i.e. there are no surrogate units in the encoding. So we have three different approaches: 1. Haddock comments say bytes 2. with/newC{W}StringLen returns unicode char count 3. peekC{W}StringLen expects Word8 or Word16 count (1) and (3) can be considered equivalent, in the sense that if you know the number of Word16 units then you know the number of Word8 units, and vice versa. It'd be nice if we could have one consistent aproach. For a start, I think we should eliminate (2), because it's dead easy the get the number of unicode chars from a String (length, if you didn't know). So whether to settle on (1) or (3) depends on what the most likely use case is for the length information. Presumably it's going to be passed to a foreign function which expects the length either in bytes or in Word16/Word32 units. Does anyone have any evidence or opinion as to which case is the most common: bytes, or encoding units? Alistair

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Re: Genuine Eratosthenes sieve [Was: Optimization fun]
by Jens Blanck 24 Jul '07

24 Jul '07

> > The point about "Eratosthenes's sieve" is that it does not specify > algorithmically how to find the next number to be crossed. It does not > even define how to store (crossed) numbers, it stores them "on paper". But , I believe that Eratosthenes's sieve does specify how to store numbers and how to find the next to cross out. This is how I remember it: 0 List the numbers from 2 onwards. 1 Take first uncrossed number, say p. 2 Cross every pth number from there on (crossed or not). 3 Repeat from 1. That "crossed or not" appears above makes repeated filters very tricky. It is trivial with a mutable array, but that is not the preferred way so one needs to somehow merge the crossing out lists. I haven't looked at it really, but being sorted lists I would have thought that this merger would be easy without resorting to things like priority queues, could someone point this out to me? The above mayeasily be optimised to only listing odd numbers (still cross out every pth number in the list), and much less importantly by starting from whereever p*p is. Jens

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Existentials and type var escaping
by Roberto Zunino 24 Jun '07

24 Jun '07

In this function data C = C Int foo :: C -> C foo ~(C x) = C x foo is _not_ the identity: its result must be non bottom, i.e. the constructor C is "forced" to its argument. I wonder if a similar function is definable for existential types: data E = forall a . E a foo :: E -> E foo, as defined above does not work (lazy patterns not allowed), and in foo y = E (case y of E x -> x) a variable escapes. I also tried with CPS with no success. Is foo definable at all? I'm starting to think that it is not, and that there must be a very good reason for that... Thank you, Zun.

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Implementing Mathematica
by Jon Harrop 15 Jun '07

15 Jun '07

I only just subscribed to this mailing list and I am a complete Haskell newbie, so forgive me if this is too OT. I noticed a recent thread about writing a Mathematica implementation in Haskell. I think this is an excellent idea and would be a great project for a Haskell newbie. I wrote a toy Mathematica implementation in OCaml while I waited to be viva'd for my PhD. It garnered so much interest that Wolfram Research bought it from me for £4,500 and gave me several free copies of Mathematica. Regarding the specific points made: 1. Numerical libraries: you should be able to reuse existing libraries like GMP, BLAS, LAPACK, FFTW and so on. These are often much faster than Mathematica's. For example, FFTW was about 4x faster than Mathematica's FFT the last time I benchmarked it. However, they do not support interval arithmetic. 2. GUI: I would take our existing vector graphics software: http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/smoke_vector_graphics/ http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/fsharp_for_visualization/ and rewrite it in Haskell as the foundation. This would far exceed anything that Mathematica has to offer, in part because Mathematica's graphics are still evaluated via the completely generic rewrite engine which is extremely slow. Our code already implements high-performance hardware-accelerated vector graphics and it is probably one of the first things I would consider porting to Haskell (if there is any commercial interest in such a library). 3. The language: the hardest part of reimplementing Mathematica is inferring what it means (there are no formal evaluation semantics). Once you've done that it is just a case of implementing an extensible term rewriter and putting in about 20 core rules. The pattern matcher is well under 100 LOC and you can do various things to make it more efficient. There are two tricks that vastly improve performance of the rewriter: return physically identical results whenever possible, and perform substitution and evaluation at the same time rather than as two separate passes. 4. Libraries: You should have no trouble exceeding the capabilities of Mathematica by pulling in existing libraries. For example, Mathematica provides no wavelet transforms, no time-frequency transforms, no function minimization over an arbitrary number of variables etc. Having worked in numerical computing for many years, I can say that Mathematica is an excellent tool for prototyping and for doing disposable analyses but many people reach for conventional languages when Mathematica's capabilities run dry. You should easily be able to implement a rewriter for the language that is ten times faster and doesn't leak. Incidentally, my implementation of Mathematica in OCaml took four days, and it was one of my first OCaml programs. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. OCaml for Scientists http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/?e

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