January 2012 - Haskell-Cafe

Conduits: Is Source a valid instance of Monad?
by Aristid Breitkreuz 04 Apr '12

04 Apr '12

Hi all, As you may have noticed, Michael Snoyman has been working on an alternative approach to I/O, called conduits. You can find it here: https://github.com/snoyberg/conduit When looking at the Source type (explained here: http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2011/12/conduits) I noticed that they seem to behave "like lists", and naturally wondered if I could write a Monad instance for them. But first, let's have a brief look at the definition of Source: data SourceResult a = Open a | Closed data PreparedSource m a = PreparedSource { sourcePull :: ResourceT m (SourceResult a) , sourceClose :: ResourceT m () } newtype Source m a = Source { prepareSource :: ResourceT m (PreparedSource m a) } ResourceT deals with resource acquisition and releasing (making sure that all resources are released), and provides a an abstraction over IORef/STRef. For our purposes here, ResourceT is probably close enough to IO. So now the question again is, can we write a Monad instance for this? I have been able to write join (concatenate) and return (a source with a single non-repeated) element. https://gist.github.com/1525471 I _think_ it behaves properly like a Monad, but I'm not quite sure, and neither was Michael. Greg Weber then suggested bringing the question to this forum. What made the question difficult for me is that this would be a stateful Monad transformer, so I'm not quite sure how to test the Monad laws properly. There's a second part to this question: If Source turns out not to be a Monad, is it possibly a ZipList-like Applicative? And either way, which is more useful: The list-like or the ziplist-like instances (of Applicative/Monad)? Thank you, Aristid

4 4

blog software in Haskell?
by Ketil Malde 30 Mar '12

30 Mar '12

Hi, I just upgraded my server, and set up everything again. Except wordpress, as 1) I'm not too fond of its user interface, and 2) it's a big pile of PHP, difficult to keep updated, and basically a disaster waiting to happen (and in fact, it was hacked at one point). Before I enable it again, is there any alternatives I should consider? Preferably written in Haskell, of course, but other suggestions welcome as well. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants

5 6

If you'd design a Haskell-like language, what would you do different?
by Robert Clausecker 09 Mar '12

09 Mar '12

Image you would create your own language with a paradigm similar to Haskell or have to chance to change Haskell without the need to keep any compatibility. What stuff would you add to your language, what stuff would you remove and what problems would you solve completely different? Thanks in advance for all answers, yours Robert Clausecker

39 91

Monad.Reader #20 call for copy
by Edward Z. Yang 07 Mar '12

07 Mar '12

I'm pleased to announce that I, Edward Z. Yang, will be taking over Brent Yorgey's role as lead editor of the Monad Reader! Call for Copy: The Monad.Reader - Issue 20 -------------------------------------------- Whether you're an established academic or have only just started learning Haskell, if you have something to say, please consider writing an article for The Monad.Reader! The submission deadline for Issue 20 will be: **Monday, March 5** The Monad.Reader ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Monad.Reader is a electronic magazine about all things Haskell. It is less formal than journal, but somehow more enduring than a wiki- page. There have been a wide variety of articles: exciting code fragments, intriguing puzzles, book reviews, tutorials, and even half-baked research ideas. Submission Details ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Get in touch with me if you intend to submit something -- the sooner you let me know what you're up to, the better. Please submit articles for the next issue to me by e-mail (ezyang(a)mit.edu) Articles should be written according to the guidelines available from http://themonadreader.wordpress.com/contributing/ Please submit your article in PDF, together with any source files you used. The sources will be released together with the magazine under a BSD license. If you would like to submit an article, but have trouble with LaTeX please let me know and we'll work something out.

1 1

ANNOUNCE: HaskellDB 2.0: Scrap your SQL strings
by Justin Bailey 22 Feb '12

22 Feb '12

What is it? ======== The HaskellDB library lets you generate SQL queries without writing any actual SQL. Unlike other query generating libraries, you choose the abstraction level. Queries can be built out of independent fragments, just like your programs. Leave hand-written, string-based, SQL libraries behind and check out HaskellDB. Where to get it? ============ You can get it from Hackage (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskelldb) or by using cabal (cabal install haskelldb). You also need drivers for your specific database. HaskellDB currently supports the HDBC family of drivers. First, download haskelldb-hdbc (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskelldb-hdbc) then get the appropriate package for your database: * ODBC: haskelldb-hdbc-odbc (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskelldb-hdbc-odbc) * Postgres: haskelldb-hdbc-postgresql (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskelldb-hdbc-postgresql) * Sqllite: haskelldb-hdbc-sqlite3 (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskelldb-hdbc-sqlite3) Documentation, Mailing List, Source, etc ======================= Go to http://trac.haskell.org/haskelldb for detailed information. What's New? ========= * New query capabilities: stored procedures, CASTs, query parameters, constants, and more. * Postgres SQL improvements. * Bug fixes around AND and OR associativity. * Query optimization improvements around aggregate expressions. * More tests. Details ===== Back in June 2009, Bjorn Bringert passed maintainership of HaskellDB to me. I've been working this summer to get a release out, which included: * Adding an examples/ directory to the source distribution. * Archiving and consolidating information to http://trac.haskell.org/haskelldb. * Accepting patches for various issues. I have used a lot of ORM & SQL-wrapper libraries during my career and HaskellDB is the first that I've found which does not require you to eventually break the abstraction. Learning to use the the library was a fun challenge but not one that many people are willing to take, when they can easily write SQL by hand. If the library was easier to get started with, I think it would be much more widely used. Help me get HaskellDB better documentation! If you are using HaskellDB and want to help: go to http://trac.haskell.org/haskelldb and write an article, write a blog post, get in touch with me, etc. When I saw that Rails 3.0 uses the "ARel" gem (based on the relational algebra) I groaned - Haskell has had that forever! We need to get the word out! Why 2.0? -------------- Last year Brian Bloniarz contributed an awesome patch which replaced HaskellDB's home-grown record system with the HList library by Oleg Kiselyov (and colleagues). I intended to work with the library for awhile and get a 1.0 release out. Unfortunately, HList proved too daunting for GHC and for me. Compile times went way up, and I could not isolate it enough to give GHC HQ a repro case. Even worse, HList required too many Oleg units for me to comprehend. I could usually fix compile errors, but found myself struggling to extend HaskellDB's functionality. In the end I felt I needed to back the patch out. I really hated to lose some of the functionality but in the end maintainability won out. At that point I had pushed a few patches with a v1.0 cabal file, so I thought it best to make this release 2.0. Who am I? --------------- I started using HaskellDB in early 2009. I use it more as a query-generating library than for executing SQL statements. I have written a largish system for generating a data-access layer in PHP from query descriptions in HaskellDB. Yes, I'm using Haskell to write PHP ... dirty! Unmaintained & Unrelated Packages ----------------------------------------------------- A couple of haskelldb related packages on Hackage are not maintained by me: * haskelldb-hdbc-mysql - This project was created and uploaded independent of me. Contact the author for specifics. However, the haskelldb-hdbc-odbc library is maintained by me and can be used to talk to MySQL. * HSQL (haskelldb-hsql, etc) - I cannot get this backend to compile on my platform. HSQL seems unmaintained so I have let the drivers decay. You'll notice I have not uploaded new packages or changed their version dependencies. * haskelldb-flat and haskelldb-dynamic - Both of these packages have suffered serious bitrot and are not maintained any longer.

5 7

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

15 18

Contributing to http-conduit
by Myles C. Maxfield 08 Feb '12

08 Feb '12

To: Michael Snoyman, author and maintainer of http-conduit CC: haskell-cafe Hello! I am interested in contributing to the http-conduit library. I've been using it for a little while and reading through its source, but have felt that it could be improved with two features: - Allowing the caller to know the final URL that ultimately resulted in the HTTP Source. Because httpRaw is not exported, the caller can't even re-implement the redirect-following code themselves. Ideally, the caller would be able to know not only the final URL, but also the entire chain of URLs that led to the final request. I was thinking that it would be even cooler if the caller could be notified of these redirects as they happen in another thread. There are a couple ways to implement this that I have been thinking about: - A straightforward way would be to add a [W.Ascii] to the type of Response, and getResponse can fill in this extra field. getResponse already knows about the Request so it can tell if the response should be gunzipped. - It would be nice for the caller to be able to know in real time what URLs the request is being redirected to. A possible way to do this would be for the 'http' function to take an extra argument of type (Maybe (Control.Concurrent.Chan W.Ascii)) which httpRaw can push URLs into. If the caller doesn't want to use this variable, they can simply pass Nothing. Otherwise, the caller can create an IO thread which reads the Chan until some termination condition is met (Perhaps this will change the type of the extra argument to (Maybe (Chan (Maybe W.Ascii)))). I like this solution, though I can see how it could be considered too heavyweight. - Making the redirection aware of cookies. There are redirects around the web where the first URL returns a Set-Cookie header and a 3xx code which redirects to another site that expects the cookie that the first HTTP transaction set. I propose to add an (IORef to a Data.Set of Cookies) to the Manager datatype, letting the Manager act as a cookie store as well as a repository of available TCP connections. httpRaw could deal with the cookie store. Network.HTTP.Types does not declare a Cookie datatype, so I would probably be adding one. I would probably take it directly from Network.HTTP.Cookie. I'd be happy to do both of these things, but I'm hoping for your input on how to go about this endeavor. Are these features even good to be pursuing? Should I be going about this entirely differently? Thanks, Myles C. Maxfield P.S. I'm curious about the lack of Network.URI throughout Network.HTTP.Conduit. Is there a particular design decision that led you to use raw ascii strings?

5 57

Exceeding OS limits for simultaneous socket connections
by Rob Stewart 07 Feb '12

07 Feb '12

Hi, I'm experiencing the "accept: resource exhausted (Too many open files)" exception when trying to use sockets in my Haskell program. The situation: - Around a dozen Linux machines running my Haskell program, transmitting thousands of messages to each other, sometimes within a small period of time. - I'm using the Network.Socket.ByteString.Lazy module to send and receive lazy bytestrings - The socket sent to the getMsg is bound and is listening, and is not closed until the program exits. getMsg is called in a loop to receive lazy bytestring from remote nodes. The socket is initialized with: sock <- Network.Socket.socket (addrFamily myAddr) Stream defaultProtocol bindSocket sock (addrAddress myAddr) listen sock 10 Here's the code: sendMsg :: Maybe HostName -> Int -> Lazy.ByteString -> IO () sendMsg dest sckt msg = do result <- try $ withSocketsDo $ do addrinfos <- getAddrInfo Nothing dest (Just (show sckt)) let serveraddr = head addrinfos sock <- socket (addrFamily serveraddr) Stream defaultProtocol connect sock (addrAddress serveraddr) sendAll sock msg sClose sock case result of Left (ex::IOException) -> return () -- permit send failure Right _ -> return () getMsg :: Socket -> IO Lazy.ByteString getMsg sock = do result <- try $ withSocketsDo $ do (conn, addr) <- accept sock getContents conn case result of Left (ex::IOException) -> putStrLn (show ex) >> getMsg sock Right msg -> return msg The current topology is a master/slave setup. For some programs that use these functions above, `sendMsg' is called thousands of times in quick succession on the remote nodes, where the destination of the `sendAll' function is the master node. Here's the maximum number of simultaneous sockets I am permitted to have open on my Linux machines: $ ulimit -n 1024 Indeed, when I experience the "accept: resource exhausted (Too many open files)" exception, I check the number of open sockets, which exceeds 1024, by looking at the contents of the directory: ls -lah /proc/<prod_id>/fd It is within the getContents function that, once the lazy bytestring is fully received, the socket is shutdown http://goo.gl/B6XcV : shutdown sock ShutdownReceive There seems to be no way of limiting the number of permitted connection requests from remote nodes. What I am perhaps looking for is a mailbox implementation on top of sockets, or another way to avoid this error. I am looking to scale up to 100's of nodes, where the possibility of more than 1024 simultaneous socket connections to one node is increased. Merely increasing the ulimit feels like a temporary measure. Part of the dilemma is that the `connect' call in `sendMsg' does not throw an error, despite the fact that it does indeed cause an error on the receiving node, by pushing the number of open connections to the same socket on the master node, beyond the 1024 limit permitted by the OS. Am I missing something? One would have thought such a problem occurs frequently with Haskell web servers and the like.. ? -- Rob Stewart

5 4

ghc-api Static Semantics?
by Christopher Brown 06 Feb '12

06 Feb '12

Hi, I was wondering if anyone could tell me if it's possible to get an AST from the ghc-api decorated with static-semantics? In particular, I am interested in use and bind locations for all names in the AST together with the module they are bound, etc. Looking through the online docs, there doesn't seem to be a way to do this. Even if I can tell from the AST where a variable is bound that would be enough, if this is by making all names unique and qualified that would be better than nothing. Hope someone can help, Chris.

4 10

Re: [Haskell-cafe] ANN: combinatorics
by Balazs Komuves 05 Feb '12

05 Feb '12

> -------------------------------------------- > -- combinatorics 0.1.0 > -------------------------------------------- > > The combinatorics package offers efficient *exact* computation of common > combinatorial functions like the binomial coefficients and factorial. > (For fast *approximations*, see the math-functions package instead.) > Shameless self-promotion: The combinat package (which deliberately does not try to own the valuable namespace Math.Combinatorics) is a more extensive combinatorics library: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/combinat While the main focus is the generation of combinatorial objects themselves, counting functions and common number sequences like the above are also offered. Even though the binomial and factorial definition in this package are the naive ones, a quick experiment imply that the differences start show themselves around 100,000 factorial, or choosing 50,000 elements out of 100,000, which is probably a rather specialized use case. The primes function in the combinat package is based on an old Cafe thread, and actually seems to be faster than the one in the combinatorics package. In any case, I may switch to the faster algorithms in the future :) Balazs

6 10