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DiscreteMap
by Henning Thielemann 30 Jul '04

30 Jul '04

In addition to the former discussion: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2002-October/010629.html Has someone thought about a type class that provides a uniform interface to Array and FiniteMap? The difference to a general Function class is that a DiscreteMap could return its domain, that is the list of all of its keys/indices/arguments.

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lhaskell.vim syntax highlighting script
by Andrew Pimlott 30 Jul '04

30 Jul '04

haskell-cafe, you are listed as the maintainer of the vim haskell syntax highlighting script. :-) lhaskell.vim uses the tex.vim syntax script, which does "set iskeyword-=_". This makes editing haskell rather uncomfortable (eg, the '*' command doesn't work right). I don't know what breaks if you "set iskeyword+=_", but getting tex highlighting right is less important than haskell editing, so I suggest this patch. Andrew --- lhaskell.vim.orig 2004-07-29 16:48:39.000000000 -0700 +++ lhaskell.vim 2004-07-29 16:50:16.000000000 -0700 @@ -86,6 +86,8 @@ runtime! syntax/tex.vim unlet b:current_syntax endif + " This messes up tex a bit, but is better for Haskell. + set isk+=_ endif " Literate Haskell is Haskell in between text, so at least read Haskell

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] optimising for vector units
by MR K P SCHUPKE 30 Jul '04

30 Jul '04

Well I have to say the dataflow style of lazy programming made me think Haskell would be ideal for multi-processor use (and now HyperThreading is common most PCs have more than one processor from the code's point of view)... I was disappointed to find GHC only uses one thread, and therefore will only use one CPU. Vectorisation is much more limited than hyperthreading - as the instructions on each vector unit must be the same... The easiest implementation would be to add primitive vector types that map directly to the underlying SIMD operations. This is probably a good starting point - it would be nice to vectorise normal expressions, but that requires an optimisation search to find instructions that can be grouped together ... this becomes a lot easier if the primitives are supported as you just need to transform the code rather than dealing with non-portable assembly instructions. The problem is that different platforms support different SIMD style instructions... What would be really needed is a IEEE/ISO standard for vector instructions much like the current one for floating point. In the absence of such a standard, the best that can be done is to abstract vectorisation by word size and number of words, and supply a software implementation of all vector ops to use if the hardware does not support certain primitives. A futher point is that for the compiler to know the vector size, you would have to resort to type level naturals... something like: data Nil data Suc x = Suc x type Four = Suc (Suc (Suc (Suc Nil))) myFn :: Vector Four Word16 Of course this would need to be integrated with the compiler. As an interim measure a C-library providing primitive operations on vectors could be written and used via the FFI. Keean.

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] why is Prelude.^ so convoluted?
by blaetterrascheln＠web.de 30 Jul '04

30 Jul '04

> x ^ n = if even n then y*y else y*y*x where y = x ^ (n `quot` 2) x ^ n | n>0 = if even n then y*y else y*y*x where y = x ^ (n `quot` 2) ________________________________________________________________ Verschicken Sie romantische, coole und witzige Bilder per SMS! Jetzt neu bei WEB.DE FreeMail: http://freemail.web.de/?mc=021193

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Typeclass problem
by Mark T.B. Carroll 30 Jul '04

30 Jul '04

I have a little programme that doesn't compile: module Example where class (Show c, Ord c, Bounded c) => MyClass c showThings :: MyClass c => c -> (String, String) showThings x = let foo = maxBound :: c in (show x, show foo) If I change that second-to-last line to, let foo = max x maxBound then it compiles. However, it's clearly silly to use "max" just to make the type of the maxBound be the same type as the x. (I'm assuming that the Ord and the Bounded instances of the type are sensibly consistent.) What should I be writing if I want foo to be the maxBound applied to the type that x is? -- Mark

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why is Prelude.^ so convoluted?
by blaetterrascheln＠web.de 29 Jul '04

29 Jul '04

{- (^) :: (Num a, Integral b) => a -> b -> a x ^ 0 = 1 x ^ n | n > 0 = f x (n-1) x where f _ 0 y = y f x n y = g x n where g x n | even n = g (x*x) (n`quot`2) | otherwise = f x (n-1) (x*y) _ ^ _ = error "Prelude.^: negative exponent" -} -- Is (^) :: (Num a, Integral b) => a -> b -> a x ^ 0 = 1 x ^ n = if even n then y*y else y*y*x where y = x ^ (n `quot` 2) _ ^ _ = error "negative exponent" -- not good enough? ________________________________________________________________ Verschicken Sie romantische, coole und witzige Bilder per SMS! Jetzt neu bei WEB.DE FreeMail: http://freemail.web.de/?mc=021193

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not getting most general type - is this a bug in hugs?
by blaetterrascheln＠web.de 29 Jul '04

29 Jul '04

$ cat x.hs rep0 :: Num a => [a] rep0 = repeat 0 rep0' = repeat 0 $ hugs x.hs ... Main> :t rep0 rep0 :: Num a => [a] Main> :t repeat 0 repeat 0 :: Num a => [a] Main> :t rep0' rep0' :: [Integer] -- WHAT?? Main> :version -- Hugs Version Nov 2002 ________________________________________________________________ Verschicken Sie romantische, coole und witzige Bilder per SMS! Jetzt neu bei WEB.DE FreeMail: http://freemail.web.de/?mc=021193

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What versions do I need to compile the fptools?
by Ron de Bruijn 29 Jul '04

29 Jul '04

I want to compile all of the fptools. This is what I did: I got all files via CVS. And I did autoreconf ./configure make But with the make step gcc crashes with an internal error on Syntax.hi. I already filled in a bug report (not the most clear of them). I especially installed an "old" version of gcc (3.3.3)(I had gcc 3.4.1-2) to be able to compile the C Macro's correctly. For the Haskell compilation I used ghc-6.2.1. I think there is somewhere somebody that can compile it, but I need the *exact* versions of the software needed to do it. Is there anyone that *can* compile all of the fptools successfully? Regards, Ron __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] optimising for vector units
by MR K P SCHUPKE 29 Jul '04

29 Jul '04

Erm, when I said no overhead I meant there is no overhead to choosing an instruction from a different thread compared to choosing an instruction from the same thread... Obviously the overall scheduling overhead will increase. >The real killer, of course, is memory latency. The cache resources >required to hold pending work can't be used to hold heap data I would have thought cache thrashing caused by two CPUs accessing the same address repeatedly would be the real killer... Of course this is not so much of a problem with hyper-threading where both 'virtual' CPUs access the same cache. >* All your functions must be strict in their arguments, I don't see that I am making that assumption. Obviously parts of the program that are in the IO monad are strict, so we start with the demand for a value required strictly by an IO function. This value will be the result of a function, so we take the graph representing the function, and carry on as suggested. This is definitely lazy as parameters not affecting the result will never be evaluated. I appreciate there are some unanswered hard questions, but most of these are to do with efficiency - not whether it is possible... Having an inefiicient implementation now rather than nothing might just be what is needed to get people looking at the efficiency issues. Thanks for the references by the way - although I am quite familiar with the Monsoon architecture - and the Pentium architecture (which since PPro has been internaly dataflow... SuperScalar is really a dataflow computer emulating a traditional processor, and interpreting its instructions) Keean./

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] optimising for vector units
by MR K P SCHUPKE 28 Jul '04

28 Jul '04

>That was me. I think you're underestimating the cost of starting >threads even in this very lightweight world. Maybe... Perhaps haskell could be made to resemble dataflow instructions more... If when a computation completes we insert the result directly into the data structure which represents function, we can infact pick any function for execution with _no_ overhead. (In a true dataflow system any instruction from any thread can be executed with no overhead) The point it at any time we have N functions ready for execution (a function is ready for execution when all its arguments are ready)... we can pick and execute any (or all of these if enough execution units are ready) of these. The suggestion I guess is to only use instructions that get their arguments from main memory. This way any instruction can be sequenced with no overhead on any CPU. With modern on-die core-speed caches this can be almost as fast a registers (with good cache access patterns) ... Note that I am only suggesting interleaving instructions at the function level, so registers can be used within functions... of course as things get more and more parallel we may see hardware with no registers, just pipelined high speed cache access. (The hardware may well use registers to pre-fetch cache values, but that can be made transparent to the software)... Hardware manufacturers have hit the limit for pure sequential execution speed, so more parallelism is the only way forward (see Intels revised roadmap, they abandoned the pentium 4 and 5 and have focused on an updated _low_power_ pentium 3M, and are planning multi core versions for more speed). C and other imperitive languages focus toom much on the how and not the what to be easy to use in such multi-cpu environments... A language with abstracts and hides the parallelism could well take off in a big way. Keean.

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