On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Brent Yorgey <byorgey@seas.upenn.edu> wrote:
I am very pleased to announce that Issue 16 of The Monad.Reader is now
available [1].

Issue 16 consists of the following three articles:

   * "Demand More of Your Automata" by Aran Donohue
   * "Iteratee: Teaching an Old Fold New Tricks" by John W. Lato
   * "Playing with Priority Queues" by Louis Wasserman

Great stuff.

As an aside, in "Playing with Priority Queues", Louis provides a number of heaps but stops short of one with O(1) worst-case persistent insert.I have an implementation of Brodal/Okasaki heaps that achieves those bounds that is available on hackage.

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/heaps

As he notes, it does make the implementation harder to follow, but it may be of interest for the reader who wants to dig into this space further. =)

If I have enough downtime, I'm hoping to add a functional version of Chazelle-style soft heaps to the library as well, which gives O(log(1/epsilon)) delete at the expense of corrupting (increasing) an epsilon worth of the keys in your heap, which is actually quite useful for a number of deterministic algorithms, like an O(n) median finding algorithm, and the fast construction of minimum spanning trees.

-Edward Kmett