--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haskell Weekly News http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080618 Issue 73 - June 18, 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to issue 73 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community. The Google Summer of Code is in full swing, preparations are underway for ICFP and the eleventh ICFP Programming Contest, and cabal-install is oh-so-sexy. It's an exciting time to be a part of the Haskell community! Community News Andy Gill has completed his move from Portland, OR to Kansas. Luke Palmer (luqui) has [2]begun work for [3]Anygma, Peter Verswyvelen's startup using Haskell (among other languages) to ``generate easy-to-use tools for creating audio-visual 2D/3D content.'' Congrats to Andy and Luke on their new beginnings! Announcements Final CFP: 2008 Haskell Symposium. Andy Gill [4]announced the final call for papers for the [5]2008 Haskell Symposium. The deadline is the 23rd of this month; please submit a paper! cabal-install. Duncan Coutts [6]announced the release of [7]cabal-install-0.5, along with the release of Cabal-1.4 to support it. It features an improved command line interface, smarter upgrading, and is made of win. If you are still stuck in the dark ages of runhaskell Setup configure blah blah, then the imperative monkeys have already won. ICFP programming contest. Tim Chevalier [8]announced the eleventh annual [9]ICFP programming contest, to be held from Friday, July 11, 2008 to Monday, July 14, 2008. Are you ready? c.h.o trac. Ian Lynagh [10]announced that it is now possible for projects on [11]community.haskell.org to [12]create themselves a trac, providing a bug tracking system and wiki. random-access-list. Stephan Friedrichs [13]announced an [14]implementation of Chris Okasaki's random-access lists, providing typical list operations (cons, head, tail) in O(1) and indexed random-access in O(log n). GHC version 6.8.3. Ian Lynagh [15]announced a [16]new patchlevel release of [17]GHC, containing a number of bugfixes relative to 6.8.2. Printf-TH. Marc Weber [18]announced that he has taken over maintenance of the [19]Printf-TH library, which implements a printf function via [20]Template Haskell, in order to guarantee that wrong argument types or the wrong number of arguments will result in compile time errors. Mueval. Gwern Branwen [21]announced the release of the [22]mueval package, providing a standalone executable for evaluating Haskell expressions based on the GHC API. Topkata. Christoph Bauer [23]announced the release of [24]Topkata, a simple OpenGL game written in Haskell. The goal is to guide a ball through a labyrinth to the opposite corner. Haddock Trac. David Waern [25]announced a new [26]bug-tracker and wiki for the [27]Haddock project. Fortress talk. Jeff Polakow [28]announced that a [29]talk on [30]Fortress, a new OO/functional language from Sun, will take place on Wednesday, June 25 at 6:30pm in Manhattan, New York, USA. ieee-0.2. Patrick Perry [31]announced the release of [32]ieee, a library that provides approximate comparison of floating point numbers based, NaN-aware minimum and maximum, and a type class for approximate comparisons. Google Summer of Code Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is [33]working on Hoogle 4, recently adding support for generating Hoogle databases to [34]Haddock, using the GHC API. This week he plans to work on database creation and text searches. DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is [35]working on a physics engine using [36]Data Parallel Haskell, recently adding rotations, represented by quaternions. Next he plans to handle collisions properly with respect to rotation, and to add documentation. Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is writing a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. He has come up with a preliminary API and is [37]asking for feedback. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal, recently refining the core model, that has built its first sources in the testing environment. The next step will be dealing with preprocessor chaining. Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. The test suite is finished, the parser and pretty printer support most GNU extensions, and all failing tests of gcc.dg are documented. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on improvements to the GHC API. GHC plugins. Maximilian Conroy Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. Discussion Low-level array performance. Dan Doel began a [38]discussion about the [39]fannkuch benchmark and the current state of Haskell support for fast low-level array operations. 1/0. Evan Laforge began a lively [40]discussion about Infinity, NaN, and Haskell's support for the IEEE floating-point standard. Documenting the impossible. Andrew Coppin began a [41]discussion on the relative merits of {-# IMPOSSIBLE #-} pragmas, calls to 'error' and 'assert', the use of tools like [42]Catch, and other methods of annotating impossible cases. Blog noise [43]Haskell news from the [44]blogosphere. * [45]PE Problem #1 in Haskell * [46]osfameron: Countdown words game solver in Haskell * [47]Algebraic Data Types in JavaScript * [48]Finance and Haskell * [49]Well-Typed.Com: New Cabal and cabal-install releases * [50]Neil Mitchell: GSoC Hoogle: Week 3 * [51]Max Bolingbroke: Compiler Plugins For GHC: The First Week * [52]Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Categories of polynomials and comonadic plumbing * [53]Roman Cheplyaka: Status report: week 3 * [54]Thomas DuBuisson (TomMD): Static Buffers Considered Harmful Quotes of the Week * ddarius: Here's the short guide to Haskell for OO programmers: Haskell isn't at all an OO language. * swalters: I'm starting to believe that learning haskell is mostly about carefully crafting small and clever functions and then finding out that they are already part of the standard library. About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [55]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [56]the Haskell Sequence and [57]Planet Haskell. [58]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [59]haskell.org. Headlines are available as [60]PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on [61]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get [62]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . References 1. http://haskell.org/ 2. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/06/18/new-job/ 3. http://anygma.com/ 4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16249 5. http://haskell.org/haskell-symposium/2008 6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cabal.devel/3267 7. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/cabal-install 8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16238 9. http://icfpcontest.org/ 10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16241 11. http://community.haskell.org/ 12. http://community.haskell.org/admin/using_project.html#trac 13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16237 14. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/random-access-lis... 15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/14645 16. http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.8.3/html/users_guide/release-6-8-3.html 17. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ 18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41293 19. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Printf-TH 20. http://www.haskell.org/th/ 21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41265 22. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/mueval 23. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41263 24. http://home.arcor.de/chr_bauer/topkata.html 25. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41249 26. http://trac.haskell.org/haddock 27. http://www.haskell.org/haddock/ 28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41235 29. http://lisp.meetup.com/59 30. http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/ 31. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41201 32. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/ieee 33. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/06/gsoc-hoogle-week-3.html 34. http://www.haskell.org/haddock/ 35. http://physics-dph.blogspot.com/2008/06/status-report-week-3.html 36. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell 37. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9259 38. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/14637 39. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=fannkuch 40. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41368 41. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41295 42. http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~ndm/catch/ 43. http://planet.haskell.org/ 44. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles 45. http://jdfrens.blogspot.com/2008/06/pe-problem-1-in-haskell.html 46. http://osfameron.vox.com/library/post/countdown-words-game-solver-in-haskell... 47. http://w3future.com/weblog/stories/2008/06/16/adtinjs.xml 48. http://blog.gmosx.com/2008/06/finance-and-haskell.html 49. http://blog.well-typed.com/2008/06/new-cabal-and-cabal-install-releases/ 50. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/06/gsoc-hoogle-week-3.html 51. http://blog.omega-prime.co.uk/2008/06/15/compiler-plugins-for-ghc-the-first-... 52. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/06/categories-of-polynomials-and-comonadic.h... 53. http://physics-dph.blogspot.com/2008/06/status-report-week-3.html 54. http://tommd.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/static-buffers-considered-harmful/ 55. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 56. http://sequence.complete.org/ 57. http://planet.haskell.org/ 58. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed 59. http://haskell.org/ 60. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/archives/20080618.pdf 61. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN 62. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/