--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haskell Weekly News http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080820 Issue 82 - August 20, 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to issue 82 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community. Announcements Lava2000 on Hackage. Emil Axelsson [2]announced that [3]Lava2000 has been uploaded to Hackage. Lava is a structural hardware description library embedded in Haskell. This version of Lava focuses on verification, and connects to a number of different verification engines (although only Smv and Satzoo are maintained in this version). QuickCheck and HPC Tutorial. Andy Gill [4]announced a half day tutorial on QuickCheck and HPC to be held at [5]DEFUN, taught by Andy Gill and Koen Claessen. The latest version of QuickCheck will also be released in conjunction with the tutorial. Compiler Construction course using Haskell?. Johannes Waldmann [6]announced that he plans to give a course in compiler construction, using Haskell as the implementation language. Any comments are appreciated, especially from anyone who has given or taken such a course. witness 0.1, open-witness 0.1. Ashley Yakeley [7]announced the release of these new packages and the draft paper on which they are based. posix-realtime 0.0.1. Vasili Galchin [8]announced the release of the posix-realtime package. benchpress 0.2.1. Johan Tibell [9]announced the first public release of [10]benchpress, a micro-benchmark library that produces statistics such as min, mean, standard deviation, median, and max execution time. wavconvert 0.1.1. Tim Chevalier [11]announced the release of [12]wavconvert, a tool which takes a directory tree as an argument, and converts any .wav files in it to .ogg (using an external OGG encoder) while filling in the ID3 tags based on the directory names. darcs hacking sprint (25-26 October). Eric Y. Kow [13]announced a darcs hacking sprint, to be held on the 25-26 of October, in Cambridge and Portland (and over IRC). The perfect opportunity to get involved, if you are interested in doing some hacking on darcs. Let Eric know if you are interested. X Haskell Bindings. Antoine Latter [14]announced that he is slowly [15]porting XCB (the X C Bindings) to Haskell, and would like input from any interested parties. logfloat. wren ng thornton [16]announced the release of the logfloat package for manipulating log-domain floating numbers. The main reason for casting numbers into the log-domain is to prevent underflow when multiplying many small probabilities as is done in Hidden Markov Models and other statistical models often used for natural language processing. The log-domain also helps prevent overflow when multiplying many large numbers. Roguestar 0.2.2. Christopher Lane Hinson [17]announced the release of version 0.2.2 of Roguestar. Google Summer of Code Progress updates from participants in the 2008 [18]Google Summer of Code. Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on [19]Hoogle 4. [20]This week, he worked on getting out the last kinks to make [21]Hoogle 4 usable as a replacement for [22]Hoogle 3. Although this is the last official week of the GSoC, he plans to continue working on it when he has time. DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a [23]physics engine using [24]Data Parallel Haskell. GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a [25]make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal. Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is [26]working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on [27]improvements to the GHC API. Jobs Platform Architect at Peerium, Inc.. Don Stewart [28]forwarded a job opportunity for a Haskell programmer at [29]Peerium, Inc. Peerium is building a new software platform for direct, real-time communication and collaboration within graphically rich environments, and is looking for a platform architect proficient in Haskell to work with the founders to design and implement components of the runtime and supporting libraries for our software platform. Resumes should be forwarded to hr [30]peerium.com. Blog noise [31]Haskell news from the [32]blogosphere. * Don Stewart: [33]The 500 Packages: Haskell, Distros, and Maintainership. * Neil Mitchell: [34]Hoogle New Features. Neil has finished his Google Summer of Code work on the [35]new version of Hoogle, but still intends to continue working on it when he gets the chance. A number of new features have been added. * Well-Typed.Com: [36]Solving the diamond dependency problem. Duncan explains how the newest version of Cabal (mostly) solves the DDDP (dreaded diamond dependency problem). * Real-World Haskell: [37]Two new chapters, preorder links, and a page count estimate. Two new beta chapters are up! * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [38]Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part 1. Dan continues his fascinating series on rational tangles, showing how to describe a tangle using do-notation. * Christopher Lane Hinson: [39]ANN: Roguestar 0.2.2. * Luis Araujo: [40]Himerge (and Haskell) out to the street!. * Neil Mitchell: [41]GSoC Hoogle: Week 12. * Twan van Laarhoven: [42]A generic merge function. * Luke Palmer: [43]Slicing open the belly of the IO monad in an alternate universe. Luke explores methods of safely performing some I/O without the IO monad in the context of FRP. * Ketil Malde: [44]The wee beginnings of a biohaskell tutorial? -- and some thoughts on programming productivity. * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [45]Using Difference Lists. * Real-World Haskell: [46]Mid-August status update. Quotes of the Week * SimonM: People don't seem to believe me when I say this. In retrospect we shouldn't have called it forkOS, we should have called it forkReallyExpensiveOnlyNecessaryForCallingOpenGL_IO. * quicksilver: unsafeInterleaveIO gives you a way to cheat if you're happy to descend into a mire of programs with no semantics. * dmhouse: Eurgh, metastereo quotes. * quicksilver: [on @yhjulwwiefzojcbxybbruweejw] it's the noise a haskell developer makes if you kick him in the de bruijn index. About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [47]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [48]the Haskell Sequence and [49]Planet Haskell. [50]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [51]haskell.org. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on [52]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get [53]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . References 1. http://haskell.org/ 2. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16381 3. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/chalmers-lava2000 4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16380 5. http://www.deinprogramm.de/defun-2008/ 6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16379 7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16376 8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43295 9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43292 10. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/benchpress 11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43282 12. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/wavconvert 13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43240 14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43230 15. http://community.haskell.org/~aslatter/code/xhb 16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43211 17. http://blog.downstairspeople.org/2008/08/16/ann-roguestar-022/ 18. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/SoC2008 19. http://code.haskell.org/hoogle/ 20. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/08/gsoc-hoogle-week-12.html 21. http://haskell.org/hoogle/beta 22. http://haskell.org/hoogle 23. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hpysics 24. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell 25. http://code.haskell.org/~Saizan/cabal 26. http://www.sivity.net/projects/language.c/wiki/ 27. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GhcApiStatus 28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43175 29. http://www.peerium.com/ 30. file://localhost/home/brent/haskell/hwn/at] 31. http://planet.haskell.org/ 32. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles 33. http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2008/08/21#the_500 34. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/08/hoogle-new-features.html 35. http://haskell.org/hoogle/ 36. http://blog.well-typed.com/2008/08/solving-the-diamond-dependency-problem/ 37. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/08/18/two-new-chapters-preorder-li... 38. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/08/untangling-with-continued-fractions_16.ht... 39. http://blog.downstairspeople.org/2008/08/16/ann-roguestar-022/ 40. http://araujoluis.blogspot.com/2008/08/himerge-and-haskell-out-to-street.htm... 41. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/08/gsoc-hoogle-week-12.html 42. http://twan.home.fmf.nl/blog/haskell/generic-merge.details 43. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/08/14/slicing-open-the-belly-of-the-io-m... 44. http://blog.malde.org/index.php/2008/08/14/the-wee-beginnings-of-a-biohaskel... 45. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/08/using-difference-lists.html 46. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/08/13/mid-august-status-update/ 47. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 48. http://sequence.complete.org/ 49. http://planet.haskell.org/ 50. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed 51. http://haskell.org/ 52. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN 53. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/