July 2014 - Haskell-Cafe

Checking minimum package bounds
by Omari Norman 08 Jul '14

08 Jul '14

Often a topic of discussion is making sure that the upper bounds on one's packages are up to date, or even whether upper bounds are a good idea at all. I don't see much discussion on lower bounds. Lower bounds that are needlessly restrictive can get in the way too. For instance, I could just slap "text >= 1.1 && < 1.2" on my package, but this makes things needlessly hard for someone trying to make my package work in conjunction with an older one, especially if all I use are basic functions like "pack" that have been around at least since, say. text-0.11. Does anyone have a best practice for testing and verifying lower bounds? Testing the lower bounds and the upper ones is a challenge. Does anybody bother? I have my sunlight package at http://hackage.haskell.org/package/sunlight but it is really a nasty hack. I am considering cleaning it up so it is less of a nasty hack but before I do that I wondered if anyone else has ever thought about this problem. Thanks. Omari

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ML Family workshop: First Call for Participation
by oleg＠okmij.org 07 Jul '14

07 Jul '14

Higher-order, Typed, Inferred, Strict: ACM SIGPLAN ML Family Workshop Thursday September 4, 2014, Gothenburg, Sweden Call For Participation http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/ML14.html Early registration deadline is August 3. Please register at https://regmaster4.com/2014conf/ICFP14/register.php This workshop specifically aims to recognize the entire extended ML family and to provide the forum to present and discuss common issues, both practical (compilation techniques, implementations of concurrency and parallelism, programming for the Web) and theoretical (fancy types, module systems, metaprogramming). We also encourage presentations from related languages (such as Scala, Rust, Nemerle, ATS, etc.), to exchange experience of further developing ML ideas. The workshop is conducted in close cooperation with the OCaml Users and Developers Workshop http://ocaml.org/meetings/ocaml/2014/ taking place on September 5. Program * Andreas Rossberg 1ML -- core and modules as one (Or: F-ing first-class modules) * Jacques Garrigue and Leo White Type-level module aliases: independent and equal * Felix Klock and Nicholas Matsakis Demo: The Rust Language and Type System * Tomas Petricek and Don Syme Doing web-based data analytics with F# * Thomas Braibant, Jonathan Protzenko and Gabriel Scherer Well-typed generic smart-fuzzing for APIs * Ramana Kumar, Magnus O. Myreen, Michael Norrish and Scott Owens Improving the CakeML Verified ML Compiler * Leo White and Frederic Bour Modular implicits * Nada Amin and Tiark Rompf Implicits in Practice * Anil Madhavapeddy, Thomas Gazagnaire, David Scott and Richard Mortier Metaprogramming with ML modules in the MirageOS * Katsuhiro Ueno and Atsushi Ohori Compiling SML# with LLVM: a Challenge of Implementing ML on a Common Compiler Infrastructure * Akinori Abe and Eijiro Sumii A Simple and Practical Linear Algebra Library Interface with Static Size Checking * John Reppy SML3d: 3D Graphics for Standard ML In addition, the joint poster session with the OCaml workshop will take place in the afternoon on September 5. The session will include posters: * Nicolas Oury Core.Sequence: a unified interface for sequences * Thomas Gazagnaire, Amir Chaudhry, Anil Madhavapeddy, Richard Mortier, David Scott, David Sheets, Gregory Tsipenyuk, Jon Crowcroft Irminsule: a branch-consistent distributed library database * Michel Mauny and Benoit Vaugon Nullable Type Inference * Edwin Toeroek LibreS3: design, challenges, and steps toward reusable libraries * Fabrice Le Fessant A Case for Multi-Switch Constraints in OPAM Program Committee Kenichi Asai Ochanomizu University, Japan Matthew Fluet Rochester Institute of Technology, USA Jacques Garrigue Nagoya University, Japan Dave Herman Mozilla, USA Stefan Holdermans Vector Fabrics, Netherlands Oleg Kiselyov (Chair) University of Tsukuba, Japan Keiko Nakata Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia Didier Remy INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt, France Zhong Shao Yale University, USA Hongwei Xi Boston University, USA

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Control.Exception.bracket is broken(?)
by Yuras Shumovich 07 Jul '14

07 Jul '14

Hello, >From docs: "If an exception is raised, then bracket will re-raise the exception (after performing the release)." But what if the release action will throw an exception? There are 3 options: 1) suppress the exception from release action and rethrow the original one 2) shutdown the program 3) suppress the original exception and throw the exception from release action. Current behavior is #3 -- suppress the original exception. I think it the worse choice. What other languages do: - java has try-with-resources statement which is the nearest equivalent of haskell's "bracket". It uses the option #1 (rethrow the original exception) - in c++ it is common to use RAII for resource management, so someone's destructor performs resource cleanup. But if destructor throws exception during stack unrolling, the program is terminated (option #2) I prefer #2 because suppressing exception is a really bad idea. What is your choice? And the related thing. Release action should not use any interruptible action. Otherwise async exception can occur while processing other exception, so one of them will be suppressed. Is it correct? Control.Exception module contains a list of uninterruptible actions (see "Interruptible operations" section), and e.g. "hClose" is not there. Is "hClose" interruptible or not? If async exception interrupts "hClose", the file descriptor will leak. So, should we use uninterruptibleMask in release action for "bracket"? Thanks, Yuras

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how to turn on RTS options?
by Johan Larson 07 Jul '14

07 Jul '14

I need to change some runtime options. I updated the options line in my cabal file: ghc-options: -Wall -fno-warn-orphans -O2 -rtsopts But when I rebuild and run, it's as though runtime options are still disabled. C:\johan\Haskell\projects\bio-acai>cabal build .\bio-acai.cabal has been changed. Re-configuring with most recently used options. If this fails, please run configure manually. Resolving dependencies... Configuring bio-acai-0.1.0.0... Building bio-acai-0.1.0.0... Preprocessing executable 'acai' for bio-acai-0.1.0.0... Preprocessing test suite 'tests' for bio-acai-0.1.0.0... C:\johan\Haskell\projects\bio-acai>dist\build\acai\acai.exe +RTS -H128m -K64m *acai.exe: Most RTS options are disabled. Link with -rtsopts to enable them.* My best guess is that the "ghc-options" line is the wrong place to try to turn on RTS option handling. But what's the right one? -- Johan Larson -- Toronto, Canada

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[ANN] codex 0.1.0 - generate tags file from dependencies
by Alois Cochard 07 Jul '14

07 Jul '14

Hi, Just to let you know that I released a new version of `codex` (a tool which generate a tags[1] file for a given cabal project using the sources of all the dependencies of that project). This release include some bug fixes as well as two new features: - Support modules added using `cabal sandbox add-source` as workspace dependencies - Support `emacs` format by disabling sorting on merge of tags files Thanks to everyone who reported bugs or submitted patch! [1]Those tags file basically contain references to functions/types definition in source code and allow "jump to definition" like functionality in text editors. source: http://github.com/aloiscochard/codex hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/codex -- *A\ois* http://twitter.com/aloiscochard http://github.com/aloiscochard

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async simplify code
by grant weyburne 07 Jul '14

07 Jul '14

Hi Cafe, Is there any way to simplify this async code to somehow merge the withAsync code into the STM code? Looking at the code for tstABorCD it is not easy to see that it is really just (A&&B)||(C&&D). Here is the code: http://lpaste.net/106945 Thanks for any pointers, Grant

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Restarting doc build on hackage
by Erik Hesselink 06 Jul '14

06 Jul '14

Hi cafe, Does anyone know if there is a way to restart a documentation build on hackage? We have a package where the documentation failed to build due to a dependency lacking upper bounds. That has recently been fixed (using the new in-place cabal file editing feature), and we'd like to get documentation for our package now. Is there any way to do this (apart from uploading a new version without changes)? Erik

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Signal Processing Library
by Vivian McPhail 06 Jul '14

06 Jul '14

Hi, There is also a signal processing package on Hackage [1] which performs auto_correlation. FFT is has been moved from hmatrix to hmatrix-gsl [2]. Hope this helps. Cheers, Vivian [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hsignal <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hstatistics> [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hmatrix-gsl <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hstatistics> Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2014 10:19:51 -0700 > From: Jeremy Wright <jeremy(a)codestrokes.com> > To: "haskell-cafe(a)haskell.org" <haskell-cafe(a)haskell.org> > Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Signal Processing Library > Message-ID: <BAY179-W29288B298009D61A9BC5A2B9000(a)phx.gbl> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > Hello: > > I'm working on my Master's Thesis, and I need a signal processing library > that can compute FFTs and autocorrelation on discrete data. Doesn't anyone > have experience with such a package in Haskell? I appreciate your time. > > Sincerely, > Jeremy Wright > >

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How to state semantics in denotational design?
by Hans Höglund 05 Jul '14

05 Jul '14

Dear all, This may seem a strange question due to my unfamiliarity with formal semantics, but bear with me. I am trying to apply denotational design principles to my library music-score, and often find myself writing down semantics of data structures in pseudo-Haskell such as > type Duration = Double > type Time = Point Duration > type Span = Time^2 > type Note a = (Span, a) The actual implementation of the data structures may or may not be identical to the semantics. For example, it makes sense to implement Span as (Time^2) or (Time x Duration), as these types are isomorphic. My question is basically: 1) Is my approach (using pseudo-Haskell) a sound way to state denotational semantics? 2) How can I state semantics (in code and/or documentation), and be sure that my implementation follow the semantics? I understand that the correctness of the implementation w.r.t. to the semantics can be verified using manual proofs, which worries me as I want to be able to refactor the semantics and be make sure that the implementation is still correct without having to repeat all the proofs. Is there a "trick" to encode the semantics in actual Haskell and have the type system and/or QuickCheck do the verification for me? Or am I misunderstanding the concept of denotational design? Sincerly, Hans - Hans Höglund Composer, conductor and developer hans [at] hanshoglund.se hanshoglund.com https://twitter.com/hanshogl https://soundcloud.com/hanshoglund http://github.com/hanshoglund

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Signal Processing Library
by Jeremy Wright 05 Jul '14

05 Jul '14

Hello: I'm working on my Master's Thesis, and I need a signal processing library that can compute FFTs and autocorrelation on discrete data. Doesn't anyone have experience with such a package in Haskell? I appreciate your time. Sincerely, Jeremy Wright

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