(apologies if you receive multiple postings) Dear All, We are pleased to announce the 8th Ghent Functional Programming Group (GhentFPG) meeting, which takes place on Thursday, the 30th of June, 2011 at 19:30 in the Technicum building of Ghent University (Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, 9000 Gent). As before, the electronic sliding doors will be locked, but a phone number that you can call to get in will be provided at the doors on the far left of the building. The structure of the meeting is a bit different than before: we begin with two short talks and end with a small problem solving activity where everyone tries to solve a given problem in his favorite functional language. The exact problem will be given at the meeting. The abstracts for the talks are as follows: Pieter Wuille ------------- I'll talk about the monadic constraint programming (MCP) framework, and in particular the Finite Domain layer i've developed for it. As explained by Tom Schrijvers in a previous talk, MCP is a general Haskell framework for Constraint Programming (CP), allowing users to search for assignments to variables that satisfy given constraints, while abstracting from the actual algorithm used to find these solutions. Finite Domain problems are a subset of CP where the variable's initial domains are finite, typically small integers. Problems that can be expressed elegantly in FD include Sudoku and N-Queens. MCP's FD layer provides an embedded Domain Specific Language (DSL) to describe these problems declaratively, some backend solvers, and an intermediate translation layer. I'll introduce the features and possibilities of the system by showing some examples, and explain some implementation details along the way. Jasper Van der Jeugt -------------------- I will give a talk about the techniques and patterns used in the Text library. Text is quickly becoming the de-facto standard type for presenting human-readable text in Haskell. My current work focuses on improving the performance of this library by porting the internally used encoding from UTF-16 to UTF-8. The talk will present a high-level overview of some tools and techniques to study and improve the performance of a Haskell program, including: strictness analysis, pitfalls for benchmarking, fusion frameworks, unboxed type representations, and GHC core. If you would like to receive updates on our activities, you can follow us on twitter (@ghentfpg), google groups (http://groups.google.com/group/ghent-fpg?pli=1) or linked.in (http://t.co/cjXbGyT) Hope to see you there! Andy Georges Jasper Van der Jeugt Jeroen Janssen The GhentFPG Organizing Committee