October 2010 - Haskell-Cafe

Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Functional dependencies and Peano numbers (and hoogle-bug?)
by Oscar Finnsson 03 May '11

03 May '11

Thanks for the great feedback. The bijective example was especially interesting. While reading "Fun with Type Functions" I notices GNum as an interesting alternative to the Num type class but I couldn't find any such package on hackagedb. Do anyone know if there is anything like GNum on hackagedb? On an unrelated note: I hoogled "to" (i.e. http://haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=to) and just got a blank page. Nothing. Nil (not even <html>...</html>). Is this a bug or a "feature"? :) The reason I hoogled it was because I'm searching for something like explicit casting found in many other languages, something similar to > class To f t where > to :: f -> t > > instance To a a where > to x = x > > instance (Real a, Fractional b) => To a b where > to = realToFrac > > instance (Read a) => To String (Maybe a) where > to = maybeRead -- not from cgi :) so I can write something like > ("23.2" `to`) :: Maybe Double or > ((42 :: Integer) `to`) :: Float Anyone made a module/package that solves this problem already? I cannot be the first that needs generic type safe conversion... . -- Oscar

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Anyone recommend a VPS?
by Michael Snoyman 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

Hi all, I'm working with a client right now on deploying an app. I was wondering if anyone had some recommendations for a Haskell-friendly host. I'm inclined to go with a VPS for this setup, but if there's reliable shared hosting, that would do as well. This client is fairly price-sensitive, so I don't think anything past the $20/month range to start off with. The only other requirement for this project is PostgreSQL. As far as wants: * Linux is preferable * A server that isn't on everyone's spam list would be better. Of course, I can route through an outside e-mail provider, but local would be nicer. * Have room to grow. For now, this is a fairly small app, but the hope of course is for it to expand. Thanks in advance. Michael

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Downloading Haskell repos from GitHub
by Gwern Branwen 20 Mar '11

20 Mar '11

Along the lines of http://blog.patch-tag.com/2010/03/13/mirroring-patch-tag/ for downloading all patch-tag.com repositories, I've begun to wonder how to download all Github repositories since more and more people seem to be using it. Nothing in http://develop.github.com/ seems especially useful for grabbing the git:// URLs of all repos by language - just by user. The only real list of repos by language seems to be gotten at via http://github.com/languages/Haskell/updated or http://github.com/languages/Haskell/created . (You might think http://github.com/languages/Haskell would be good, but no, it's just a few random repos by interest and not a full listing.) I looked at the HTML, and it looks possible to use tagsoup to get all 98 pages and then parse the entries to get the HTTP URLs of the repos, and then turn *that* into git:// URLs suitable for shelling out to 'git clone', but I can't help but wonder if maybe there's a better approach someone more familiar with Github would know. -- gwern

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Infinite types should be optionally allowed
by Job Vranish 22 Feb '11

22 Feb '11

There are good reasons against allowing infinite types by default (mostly, that a lot of things type check that are normally not what we want). An old haskell cafe conversation on the topic is here: http://www.nabble.com/There%27s-nothing-wrong-with-infinite-types!-td771373… However, I think infinite types should be allowed, but only with an explicit type signature. In other words, don't allow infinite types to be inferred, but if they are specified, let them pass. I think it would be very hard to shoot yourself in the foot this way. Newtype is the standard solution to situations where you really need an infinite type, but in some cases this can be a big annoyance. Using newtype sacrifices data type abstraction and very useful type classes like Functor. You can use multiparameter type classes and functional dependencies to recover some of the lost abstraction, but then type checking becomes harder to reason about and the code gets way more ugly (If you doubt, let me know, I have some examples). Allowing infinite types would fix this. I'm imagining a syntax something like this: someFunctionThatCreatesInfiniteType :: a -> b | b = [(a, b)] Thoughts? Opinions? Am I missing anything obvious? - Job

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A question regarding cmdargs package
by Ben Franksen 31 Dec '10

31 Dec '10

How can I disable the standard arguments 'help' and 'version'? Cheers

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what is the status of haskell's mail libraries?
by Günther Schmidt 29 Dec '10

29 Dec '10

Hi all, I was just looking for mail libraries on hackage. You know libraries where I can construct an email, or retrieve on from the server. With retrieving an email I mean something with a bit more structure than a String, or, God help me, a ByteString. Where are we on this subject? I really cannot tell from the first glance. Günther

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Compiling a DSL on the shoulders of GHC
by Patai Gergely 26 Dec '10

26 Dec '10

Hello all, I'm trying to reuse as much of the sweat and tear put into GHC as possible to derive a compiler for a language highly similar to Haskell in many aspects. The difference is that instead of constructing an expression of type IO (), the programmer has to provide a stream processor on the top level - whether this is an arrow structure or just a pure function mapping input to output is not decided yet. In other words, I want to allow the programmer to use full Haskell as a metaprogramming language to create an expression of a much more limited language. My idea was to move the relevant types into a module, and make my combinators simple data constructors behind the scene, so the Haskell phase would effectively build an AST. The tricky bit is that I don't necessarily want to make everything an explicit data constructor. For instance, I'd like to allow Haskell functions in the tree. Using the GHC API, I can get the Core representation of the metaprogram. What I'd like at this point is to evaluate the top level expression and still have a representation open to analysis (traversal, pretty printing, interpretation etc.), including lambdas; if this evaluation takes more time than some well-defined limit, I could treat it as a compile-time error. Basically, I want the constant that is the main program to be folded completely if possible during compile time, and signal an error in case it isn't or doesn't seem to be. The resulting structure would be transformed further by a separate application instead of the existing GHC backends. Unfortunately the GHC API is not very approachable for the uninitiated, so it's not clear to me whether this is even possible. Or is it simply such a bad idea that it's not even worth considering in the face of more conventional approaches? Gergely -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Same, same, but different...

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type class design
by Uwe Schmidt 21 Dec '10

21 Dec '10

Dear Haskellers, I've a question about type class design. When developing the set of functions for a class, there are often two or more functions, let's say f and g, where the semantics of g can be expressed by f. When writing down the code, there are two choices for g. First g is included in the type class, second g is defined outside and the signature has a context referencing the class. 1. case class Foo a where f :: ... a ... g :: ... a ... g = expr[f] 2. case class Foo a where f :: ... a ... g :: Foo a => ... a ... g = expr[f] What are the reasons for choosing 1., what are the arguments for 2.? My arguments for 1.: a) Efficiency: g may be overwritten in an instance declaration by a more efficient piece of code. b) Readability: All functions, which are logically connected are grouped together in a single syntactic construct and can be found in one place (similar to an interface in Java). My argument for 2.: c) Correctness: The semantics for g are fix (relative to f), All laws for g hold everywhere, assuming f is implemented correctly. I've sometimes the problem to balance the reasons for 1. and 2 and I doubt, that this list of criteria is complete. In the standard Haskell classes we can find both cases, even within a single class. Eq with (==) as f and (/=) as g belongs to the 1. case, so does Monad and (>>=) as f and (>>) as g. But (>=>) and the Monad class fall into the 2. case. It seem, there is no uniform or consistent strategy in the core Haskell classes. What are your best practice rules for this problem? Expecting your advices, Uwe

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In what language...?
by Andrew Coppin 03 Dec '10

03 Dec '10

Yesterday I read a rather interesting paper: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mb566/papers/tacc-hs09.pdf It's fascinating stuff, and I *think* I understand the gist of what it's saying. However, the paper is utterly festooned with formulas that look so absurdly over-the-top that they might almost be a spoof of a mathematical formula rather than the real thing. A tiny fraction of the notation is explained in the paper, but the rest is simply "taken to be obvious". The paper also uses several ordinary English words in a way that suggests that they are supposed to have a more specific technical meaning - but I have no idea what. Does anybody have any idea which particular dialect of pure math this paper is speaking? (And where I can go read about it...)

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Bulletproof resource management
by Florian Weimer 28 Nov '10

28 Nov '10

At least in my experience, in order to get proper resource management for things like file or database handles, you need both a close operation and a finalizer registered with the garbage collector. The former is needed so that you can create resources faster than the garbage collector freeing them. The latter is a safety net in cases where proper resource management is not follwoed (perhaps in GHCi). When the explicit close operation or the finalizer has been invoked, the object must somehow be disabled, so that further operations on it fail (otherwise, you might dereference a dangling pointer). What's the idom for implementing this in Haskell (or GHC)? It seems that a ForeignPtr cannot be written to (otherwise I'd change it to a null pointer when the resource is freed). It's also not possible to check if the finalizers have been run. Can the finalizers hold a reference to the object which in turn holds the ForeignPtr to be finalized? Or would that prevent the finalizers from running at all? Is there a way to avoid the extra level of indirection (or is GHC sufficiently smart to optimize it away)?

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