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ANN: Two new random-fu releases
by James Cook 24 Jun '11

24 Jun '11

Announcing the Hackage release of two new versions[1,2] of the random- fu package: Version 0.1.4 is a build-fix release that extends support of the 0.1 API to GHC 7. Version 0.2 is a significantly restructured version of the package. Its API is mostly the same as the old for end users, but its back-end has been redesigned and separated into two new packages: "random- source" provides an abstract interface for sources of entropy, and "rvar" provides an abstract interface for consumers of entropy. The parts remaining in "random-fu" provide a more concrete interface for representing and sampling specific distributions. -- James [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/random-fu-0.1.4 [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/random-fu-0.2

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Haskell Weekly News: Issue 187
by Daniel Santa Cruz 24 Jun '11

24 Jun '11

Welcome to issue 187 of the HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. This release covers the week of June 12 to 18, 2011. Announcements Ian Lynagh announced a new patchlevel release of GHC (7.0.4). "This release contains a handful of bugfixes relative to 7.0.3, so we recommend upgrading." http://goo.gl/hOvdA Nicolas Wu released the third instance fo Haskell Parallel Digest. Many thanks to Nick and Eric for putting this together. http://goo.gl/s5muy Jeroen Janssen invited us to the 8th Ghent Functional Programming Group Meeting, to be held on Thursday, the 30th of June, in the Technicum building of Ghent University. http://goo.gl/G081Q Quotes of the Week * monochrom: if I were dying to learn covariance, I would not be looking for entertainment, like, I'm dying, I only have 5 minutes to learn covariance, thank you very much * hpc: the categorical dual of a hippomorphism should be a giraffomorphism * ksf: but, as, maybe indeed or not apparently, english, in, or especially in, punctuation matters is an utter mess. * 00:56:03 <benmachine> @faq can haskell tell if I am lagging [...] 00:57:18 <lambdabot> The answer is: Yes! Haskell can do that. Top Reddit Stories * Haskell: the Craft of Functional Programming, 3rd edition is out! Domain: haskellcraft.com, Score: 44, Comments: 10 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/6ZInj Original: http://goo.gl/t0GAX * GHC 7.0.4 is out Domain: haskell.org, Score: 42, Comments: 2 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/oxSJH Original: http://goo.gl/EzWUP * SafeHaskell pushed into GHC Domain: haskell.org, Score: 39, Comments: 5 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/sOrjr Original: http://goo.gl/2Rw56 * Minimum footprint for a GHC program: or, think about your TSOs Domain: stackoverflow.com, Score: 23, Comments: 0 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/eIF0o Original: http://goo.gl/dRgLG * Pieces of Yesod: Inverting a Haskell Function Domain: chplib.wordpress.com, Score: 21, Comments: 8 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/NFJNH Original: http://goo.gl/x2cz2 * The 2011 ICFP contest is starting in just 6 hours! Domain: icfpcontest.org, Score: 20, Comments: 15 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/BS7XI Original: http://goo.gl/oqj0Y * A pattern for avoiding allocation : Inside T5 Domain: blog.ezyang.com, Score: 19, Comments: 12 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/thuRP Original: http://goo.gl/IZCIh * Package of the Day: an improved runghc for fast repeated runs Domain: hackage.haskell.org, Score: 16, Comments: 9 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/k6mQK Original: http://goo.gl/a0DAC * The Supero Supercompiler Domain: community.haskell.org, Score: 16, Comments: 2 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/vBeFO Original: http://goo.gl/3QsmC * Galois Video: Building an Open-Source Autonomous Quad-Copter Domain: corp.galois.com, Score: 15, Comments: 3 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/HZghO Original: http://goo.gl/6AcMw Top StackOverflow Questions * Why does performGC fail to release all memory? votes: 17, answers: 2 Read on SO: http://goo.gl/dRgLG * OSX, ghci, dylib, what is the correct way? votes: 17, answers: 1 Read on SO: http://goo.gl/0s9Tu * Why does Haskell's `head` crash on an empty list (or why *doesn't* it return an empty list)? (Language philosophy) votes: 15, answers: 6 Read on SO: http://goo.gl/tghQR * Towards understanding CodeGen* in the Haskell LLVM bindings votes: 13, answers: 1 Read on SO: http://goo.gl/LPZ2F * What happens to you if you break the monad laws? votes: 13, answers: 3 Read on SO: http://goo.gl/Trvny * Is anyone using delimited continuations to do web development in Haskell? votes: 12, answers: 3 Read on SO: http://goo.gl/hGjuB * The concept of Bottom in Haskell votes: 12, answers: 1 Read on SO: http://goo.gl/9b1ZJ About the Haskell Weekly News To help create new editions of this newsletter, please send stories to dstcruz(a)gmail.com. Until next time, Daniel Santa Cruz

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Iteratee IO examples
by David Place 24 Jun '11

24 Jun '11

Hi, I've been trying to learn Iteratee IO. I've made some progress by studying John Millikin's examples in the source of the enumerator package. I was surprised how confusing I found the tutorials that are available. I think that it is primarily because of the lack of concrete examples. It would be great if we could accumulate a collection of small concrete programs like John's wc.hs which show various uses of Data.Enumerator. Here's a little program I wrote to find the longest run of same characters in a file. > http://hpaste.org/48255 Does anyone else have little examples like this that use Iteratee IO? Cheers, David ____________________ David Place Owner, Panpipes Ho! LLC http://panpipesho.com d(a)vidplace.com

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Weird multi-threading runtime behaviour of single-threaded program with GHC-7.0.3
by Herbert Valerio Riedel 24 Jun '11

24 Jun '11

Hello, I'm experiencing an unexpected behaviour with GHC-7.0.3/x86_64's multithreading runtime when running some more demanding single-thread computations. I've isolated the part of the larger application which exposes the problem down to the parsing of a ~8MiB JSON file which causes quite a bit of memory allocations (source at end of email). The program is compiled with ghc --make -O2 -threaded -eventlog -rtsopts parse_aeson.hs and I ran it with and w/o the -N12 option on a 12-core machine (the problem is visible on a 4-core machine as well): $ time ./parse_aeson test.json 0.000392s after readFile 0.001016s parse was a success... 6.050836s NFed parse-tree... 6.050968s NFed parse-tree... no exception real 0m6.100s user 0m5.680s sys 0m0.419s $ time ./parse_aeson test.json +RTS -N12 0.001249s after readFile 0.001777s parse was a success... 10.048607s NFed parse-tree... 10.048738s NFed parse-tree... no exception real 0m10.125s user 0m57.496s sys 0m39.927s When observing top(1)'s output, I saw that all HECs consumed a substantial amount of cpu cycle, so I loaded up threadscope to see what the remaining 11 HECs were doing all the time. I've put the resulting eventlog files and screenshots of threadscope's visualization online at http://www.narf.at/~hvr/Haskell/parse_aeson.N0.eventlog.png http://www.narf.at/~hvr/Haskell/parse_aeson.N0.eventlog.xz http://www.narf.at/~hvr/Haskell/parse_aeson.N12.eventlog.png http://www.narf.at/~hvr/Haskell/parse_aeson.N12.eventlog.xz What's happening there? The actual processing work seems to be done in a single HEC... but what are the remaining 11 HECs doing exactly? Am I doing something wrong? What does it mean when the GC-bars in threadscope becomes green as in the middle of the screenshot below? http://www.narf.at/~hvr/Haskell/parse_aeson.N4.eventlog.pdf ------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- also available at http://www.narf.at/~hvr/Haskell/parse_aeson.hs module Main where import Control.DeepSeq import Control.Exception import Data.Aeson import Data.Time import System.Environment import qualified Data.Attoparsec.Lazy as APL import qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy.Char8 as LB parseIt :: FilePath -> IO () parseIt fn = do t0 <- getCurrentTime let putStrLn' !s = do t0' <- getCurrentTime putStrLn $ show (t0' `diffUTCTime` t0) ++ " " ++ s json_text <- LB.readFile fn putStrLn' "after readFile" let Success p = decode json_text :: Result Value putStrLn' "parse was a success..." putStrLn' $ p `deepseq` "NFed parse-tree..." putStrLn' $ p `deepseq` "NFed parse-tree..." decode :: FromJSON a => LB.ByteString -> Result a decode = either Error fromJSON . APL.eitherResult . APL.parse json main :: IO () main = do fns <- getArgs case fns of [fn] -> do res <- try $ parseIt fn case res of Left e -> putStrLn $ "caught: " ++ show (e :: SomeException) Right () -> putStrLn "no exception" _ -> putStrLn "usage: parse_aeson <json-file>"

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 187
by Jack Henahan 24 Jun '11

24 Jun '11

You could always just subscribe to the HWN feed on Contemplating Code. I just load up my reader when I don't want to read the text dispatches. Try http://contemplatecode.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss That's the feed URL I use. Then the one on the mailing list is your plaintext fallback. :D On Jun 23, 2011, at 8:48 PM, Conrad Parker wrote: > On 24 June 2011 02:24, Rogan Creswick <creswick(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 11:16 AM, Simon Michael <simon(a)joyful.com> wrote: >>> On 6/23/11 10:49 AM, Iustin Pop wrote: >>>> >>>> FYI, a regular link (though longer) seems more appropriate to me. >>>> Don't know if other people feel the same though. >> >> I prefer the short links, since it is much easier to keep track of >> what's going on when reading on a small screen (much of my email >> reading these days is done on my phone.) > > I'd prefer to just read an HTML version of HWN on my phone. How about > simply sending an HTML email with a plaintext fallback? > > In the plaintext email I'd prefer full URLs to cut/copy on my computer terminal. > > Conrad. > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe(a)haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

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Data.Enumerator question
by David Place 24 Jun '11

24 Jun '11

I can see that an Enumeratee can produce fewer outputs than it receives as inputs. For example, this GroupBy Enumeratee. > http://hpaste.org/47916 Can an Enumeratee produce more outputs than inputs? For instance, take a Data.Text and send each character to the inner Iteratee individually. I feels this can be done, but don't see how to do it. Thanks. ____________________ David Place Owner, Panpipes Ho! LLC http://panpipesho.com d(a)vidplace.com

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Category theory as a design tool
by wren ng thornton 23 Jun '11

23 Jun '11

On 6/23/11 1:39 AM, Arnaud Bailly wrote: > Of course, we can always say that each > system is a language of its own (rather than *has* a language...) which is > what Eric Evans coined with its "Ubiquitous language" term. But I find it > difficult to connect that particular dots. That's certainly my take on things (which I argued for at a workshop last week). Then again, I'm a linguist and type theorist, so viewing systems as languages[1] comes naturally. Do you have a link to Evans' coinage and argument? [1] Or rather, APIs as languages, their implementations as (defining their) semantics, and their execution as parsing. >> As an example of this approach, see my comments in the thread about >> anonymous sum types. For something to be a product means that a particular >> diagram commutes: namely, a product is the limit of the two point category >> (and coproducts are the colimit). One of the many things this tells us is >> that if we posit that A*A ~ A in a category that "has products", we must >> infer that the category is a meet-(pre)semilattice[1]. > > I certainly won't argue with you on this given my limited knowledge of what > a meet-(pre)semilattice could be :-) A preorder is just a generalization of a partial order, which we can gloss over here. A meet-semilattice is just a partial order with a "meet" operation, i.e. every pair of elements has a greatest lower bound. (A join-semilattice is the dual, with LUB instead of GLB.) > But then, if I happen to understand > what it is, how could that help me design and code "better" systems? I have > the intuition it could help me but again I do not (yet) see how. Well, for this example, there was the proposed idea to have anonymous union types with the injectors given by the types of the components (e.g., for the type A|B we'd have data constructors A :: A -> A|B and B :: B -> A|B). But this raises the issue of how to deal with A|A. Someone suggested that we could just say that A|A is the same as A. However, doing so means that the (|) type operator cannot be a coproduct. That's not a game-killer per se ---afterall, Either isn't a corpoduct--- but it does suggest that something fishy is going on. In this case, the better system is the one we already have, where we use disjoint unions (Either) instead of non-disjoint unions (|). To put a different spin on it, in the dual case we can show that Haskell's (,) is not a categorical product. There's a good deal of historical debate about why it works the way it does, but if we're looking to make a better system then the fact that tuples are not well-behaved suggests a place for improvement. The current (,) is a compromise between two different notions of product in domain theory. On the one hand we have domain products (which do not produce domains) and on the other hand we have smash products (which can "lose" information). I've had in mind for a while to make a Haskell-like language with a total functional core. In a total language (even a lazy one), we don't have bottom so we don't need domain theory to reason about the language. So in a language which is only partially total, it's reasonable to have two different kinds of products--- which means we can get away from Haskell's compromise, but do so in a way that's harmonious with the rest of the language. Would this new system be "better"? I dunno. It would behave in a more lawful manner, so it should be easier to reason about; but then we're making programmers keep that reasoning in mind, and maybe that's too much work. A decent system has to be both correct but also usable, and human factors are messy and hard to predict. -- Live well, ~wren

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Category theory as a design tool
by Arnaud Bailly 23 Jun '11

23 Jun '11

(2nd try, took my gloves off...) Hello Café, I have been fascinated by Cat. theory for quite a few years now, as most people who get close to it I think. I am a developer, working mostly in Java for my living and dabbling with haskell and scala in my spare time and assuming the frustration of having to live in an imperative word. More often than not, I find myself trying to use constructs from FP in my code, mostly simple closures and typical data types (eg. Maybe, Either...). I have read with a lot of interest FPS (http://homepages.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~tk/fps/) which exposes a number of OO patterns inspired by FP. Are there works/thesis/books/articles/blogs that try to use Cat. theory explicitly as a tool/language for designing software (not as an underlying formalisation or semantics)? Is the question even meaningful? Thanks in advance, Arnaud

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Problem with GLUT - no visuals found
by Jason Dagit 23 Jun '11

23 Jun '11

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 11:57 AM, Chris Smith <cdsmith(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, 2011-06-23 at 11:50 -0700, Jason Dagit wrote: >> What is your deadline for making sure you have a working library? >> > > I don't know... August? In any case, I do now have a working library, > so long as I remember not to use GHCi for it! > > While GLFW would certainly be far preferable to GLUT in the long run, > the fact is that Gloss is already implemented using GLUT, and I can make > GLUT work. So I'll plan on using that unless someone else volunteers to > port Gloss to GLFW. > > (To be honest, I did consider it when I first ran into this problem a > week ago; but after a few hours of hacking at it, it became clear that > it's too large a job, and I'm far too unfamiliar with GLUT, GLFW, or > OpenGL, for that to be feasible as yet another side project for me.) Yes, I've suggested to the author of Gloss that he should switch to GLFW-b but he basically said what you said. He considered it when I mentioned it, but since Gloss already works with GLUT he wouldn't do it unless someone sent him the patches. Which is fair from a maintenance point of view. The downside is that all the windows users of Gloss have to get/install the glut32.dll from somewhere before Gloss will work for them. GLFW-b doesn't have that restriction. Also, when I first looked at GLFW I thought it didn't call atexit() (GLUT uses atexit(), which I think is kind of an evil C function, without having a specific gripe other than it being global mutable state), but it does actually use it. This line of thought always leads me to think that we should have a purely Haskell implementation of GLFW/GLUT on top of the platform specific gui bindings. At any rate, I'm glad to hear you have what you need for your class. Jason

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Problem with GLUT - no visuals found
by Chris Smith 23 Jun '11

23 Jun '11

So I'm running into an embarrassing problem trying to prepare for the computer programming class that I intend to 12-13 year olds in Haskell this coming fall. I had decided to use gloss, an excellent package by Ben Lippmeier that makes it really easy to build images, animations, simulations, and games in a straight-forward and functional way. Excellent... but suddenly broken on my system since installing Ubuntu 11.4, and it looks like the cause traces back to GLUT. Prelude Graphics.Gloss> displayInWindow "Test" (100,100) (100,100) white (Circle 80) freeglut (<interactive>): ERROR: Internal error <Visual with necessary capabilities not found> in function fgOpenWindow X Error of failed request: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) Major opcode of failed request: 4 (X_DestroyWindow) Resource id in failed request: 0x0 Serial number of failed request: 25 Current serial number in output stream: 28 and Prelude Graphics.UI.GLUT> initialize "foo" [] [] Prelude Graphics.UI.GLUT> get displayModePossible False Nothing I can find to change in GLUT causes displayModePossible to be True, and I'm at the end of my knowledge here. A quick web search turns up the occasional person complaining about the freeglut error, but in all cases they have trouble running any GLUT applications, and it turns out their configuration doesn't do direct rendering. In my case, glxgears and any other non-Haskell GLUT applications I can find work great, but Haskell's GLUT bindings are giving me no hint of success. Any ideas? -- Chris Smith

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