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Monad @ Microsoft
by Josef Svenningsson 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

OK, this one is just too good not to post about it. Microsoft has developed a now command line interface. Guess what they call it? Read it here: http://slashdot.org/articles/03/10/31/1346201.shtml?tid=185&tid=190&tid=201 Well, it seems Simoj PJ is doing a good job introducting functional programming at MS although his methods are subtle in the extreme :-) /Josef

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RE: fixed point
by Harris, Andrew 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

Hi - I am trying to work out how the following function using "fix" is evaluated. I am hoping someone could look at my step-by-step breakdown of how I think evaluation works and see if I'm correct. My main question is how the order of operation (fixity?) is understood in going from step [3] to [4], if this is indeed how the evaluation would take place. Any help is appreciated, -andrew Here's the Haskell function: --- fix f = f (fix f) wierdFunc2 x y z = if y - z > z then x (y-z) z else y - z myRemainder = fix wierdFunc2 --- Here's my "evaluation": myRemainder 12 5 -- [1] = fix wierdFunc2 12 5 -- [2] by substitution = wierdFunc2 fix wierdFunc2 12 5 -- [3] apply "fix" = wierdFunc2 myRemainder 12 5 -- [4] by substitution (?) = myRemainder 7 5 -- [5] apply "wierdFunc2" = fix wierdFunc2 7 5 -- [6] by substitution = wierdFunc2 fix wierdFunc2 7 5 -- [7] apply "fix" = wierdFunc2 myRemainder 7 5 -- [8] by substitution (?) = 2 -- [9] apply "wierdFunc2"

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newbie question regarding type declarations
by gangadhar npk 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

hi, I am a newbie to Haskell. I am reading the tutorial by Hal Daume III. Regarding the function types which are an extension of lambda calculus, I was wondering if at all it is possible to write a type that would return two values as the output - something like a square function which would take a pair and return a pair. I tried this, but there are errors square :: (Num a, Num b) => (a ,b) square (x , y) = (x*x , y*y) How can I specify that the square functions output would be a pair ? thank you gangadhar

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Heap profiling in GHC broken?
by Markus.Schnell＠infineon.com 30 Oct '03

30 Oct '03

Hi. When I tried to profile my program in search for space leaks, it core dumped on me (actually on Win2000/Cygwin). I'm using ghc 6.0.1. Does anybody know what could be the problem? (To be more precise: any +RTS -h_ options make problems, +RTS -p works fine. I get a message meaning the equivalent of "statement in '0x0058db43' points to memory in '0xfffffffc'. Could not read.") Cheers, Markus -- Markus Schnell

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Haskell Asignement not working
by Rachel Reid 29 Oct '03

29 Oct '03

My code is --1)Define a function bLine to give a line of horizontal #s import Pictures sb, sw :: Picture bLine :: Int -> Picture bLine n ) |n==0 = ) |n>0 = `sideBySide` sb (bLine (n-1)) and when running Hugs, it says that there is a <unexpected symbol "#"> in line 9 which is bLine n ). There was a hash sign previously, but I have reloaded Hugs since then. can you help Thanks Rachel

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fixed point
by Harris, Andrew 29 Oct '03

29 Oct '03

Hi - I am trying to do Exercise 9.9 in HSOE; and I've come up with an answer that works but I'm not sure if it answers the question properly. The problem is: The Question: ------------- Suppose we define a function "fix" as: fix f = f (fix f) Suppose further we have a recursive function: remainder :: Integer -> Integer -> Integer remainder a b = if a < b then a else remainder (a - b) b Rewrite this function using "fix" so that it's not recursive. My Answer: ---------- wierdFunc x y z = if y - z > z then ((\a b c -> a b c) x (y-z) z) else ((\a b c -> a b c) (\d e -> d) (y-z) z) myRemainder = fix wierdFunc My Question: ------------ Does the ((\a b c -> a b c) x (y-z) z) mean that I've not removed the recursion? I was assuming that I was returning a function that is to be evaluated and not actually doing any recursion. That's why I thought I answered the question. However, I have a headache now and would like another opinion. thanks, -andrew

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Cast from and to CChar
by Christian Buschmann 28 Oct '03

28 Oct '03

Hi! I've got following problem. If I enter in ghci following line: Prelude Foreign.C> castCCharToChar $ castCharToCChar 'ü' I would expect that this returns 'ü', but it returns '\252'. Is this the correct behaviour? Or am I doing something wrong? Or are there any problems with language specific characters and CChar? thanks Christian B.

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I/O multiplexing (repost)
by Peter Simons 27 Oct '03

27 Oct '03

[ I'm posting this article here again, because the general ] [ mailing list seems to be closed to non-members, and I'm ] [ reading/posting through gmane.org. Pardon me, if you see ] [ this on both lists, please. -peter ] Hi, I have a question concerning "manual" I/O multiplexing in Haskell, or specifically with GHC. I have written an interface to the C library ADNS, which performs asynchronous DNS queries. Everything is fine and dandy, but now comes the hard part: The function foreign import ccall adns_beforepoll :: State -- ADNS context -> Ptr Pollfd -- space for 'n' Pollfd -> Ptr CInt -- n -> Ptr CInt -- max timeout -> Ptr (Timeval) -- current time -> IO CInt generates an array of file descriptors, suitable for calling poll(2). The function foreign import ccall adns_afterpoll :: State -> Ptr Pollfd -> CInt -> Ptr (Timeval) -> IO CInt scans this array (after poll has been called), performs I/O on all readable/writable sockets, and processes any packets that have been received. Obviously, the library wants me to call poll myself, though. But since poll is not supported by Haskell's run-time system, the call would block _all_ running threads in my process, not just the thread doing the DNS resolving. I have considered the following options to solve this: 1. Run the DNS resolver in a forkOS thread. 2. Declare all imported functions to be thread-safe (what they are) and use forkIO. 3. Call poll(2) without blocking, then conjure some magic to decide when to call it again without busy polling. 4. Register the file descriptors with GHC's internal poll event loop. Option (1) seems to be straight-forward, but I don't want to rely on the non-standard forkOS function unless I really have to. The same goes for (4): This is probably a good solution, but it's not portable among compilers. (3) works fine, but is unsatisfactory because the resolver will have comparably large latency times. (I have been processing DNS queries every, say, second.) So option (2) seems quite attractive compared to the others ... But the question is: Would that even work? Any ideas, thoughts, recommendations? Peter

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RE: fixed point
by Harris, Andrew 27 Oct '03

27 Oct '03

> > Notice that, (\x -> x) a reduces to a, so (\a b c -> a b c) x (y-z) z > reduces to x (y-z) z. You can therefore simplify your > function quite a > bit. > wierdFunc x y z = if y-z > z then x (y-z) z else (\d e -> d) (y-z) z > and you can still apply that lambda abstraction (beta-reduce) > wierdFunc x y z = if y-z > z then x (y-z) z else y-z > None of these (except, of course, fix and remainder) are recursive. A > recursive function is just one that calls itself. For wierdFunc to be > recursive, the identifier wierdFunc would have to occur in the > right-hand side of it's definition. > Thanks for your help. For some reason I didn't think "x (y - z) z" and "y - z" had the same type. I am still trying to understand how they do. Also, had a feeling the fix function was related to the "Y" combinator; it seems they're the same thing! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_combinator thanks again, -andrew

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replacing guile with haskell?
by David Roundy 25 Oct '03

25 Oct '03

I'm wondering what the possibilities are for replacing the use of guile with a haskell interpereter? I'd like to be able to embed a haskell interpereter (presumably hugs) withing my program, so that the input file could be a haskell program. The application is a numerical simulation code, for which the input is (among other things) a photonic crystal structure. Practically, this means that the input file needs to be a program (or the user needs to write a program to generate the input file--ugly). Currently my code works as a C++ library, but that isn't particularly convenient (except for development). A similar code (mpb--it's available in debian) by a coworker has the input format in scheme using guile. That's nice in many ways, except I can't stand scheme. So I'm wondering whether there might be some convenient way to accomplish the same goal with haskell. Currently, my best (and only) idea is to make the input file a script with #!/usr/bin/env runhugs at the top (and compiling an interface module with ffihugs). There are a couple of issues with this. The first is that I've heard that hugs isn't intended for numerical work (which is what I'm doing). I'm not sure if this will be a problem, since hugs won't be doing any of the real work anyways. The other is that according to the man page, it seems that hugs only supports ffi on x86, powerpc and sparc, which seems likely to be a show stopper. Since I'll need to run the code on supercomputers, I won't always have a choice of architectures, and at least support for POWER (maybe comes free with powerpc?) would be necesary--IBM SP machines are quite nice. In this regard, ghc seems worse than hugs (the thought of bootstrapping ghc on a supercomputer gives me the shivers), and nhc98 last time I looked didn't support 64 bit platforms. Is there a solution to these problems, or will I be stuck with thousands of parentheses in my input file? -- David Roundy http://www.abridgegame.org/darcs

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