--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haskell Weekly News http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20081018 Issue 89 - October 18, 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to issue 89 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community. Announcements New Haskell tutorial. Miran Lipovaca (BONUS) has written a new and most excellent Haskell tutorial, [2]"Learn You a Haskell For Great Good!". Glob 0.1, globbing library. Matti Niemenmaa [3]announced the release of [4]Glob 0.1, a [5]small library for glob-matching purposes based on a subset of zsh's syntax. hledger 0.1, command-line accounting tool. Simon Michael [6]announced the [7]first release of [8]hledger, a command-line accounting tool similar to John Wiegley's c++ ledger. hledger generates simple ledger-compatible transaction and account balance reports from a plain text ledger file. [ANN] Haskell Cheatsheet v1.0. Justin Bailey [9]announced a [10]"cheat sheet" for Haskell, a PDF that tries to summarize Haskell 98's syntax, keywords and other language elements. Salsa: A .NET Bridge for Haskell. Andrew Appleyard [11]announced the [12]first release of [13]Salsa, an experimental Haskell library that allows Haskell programs to access .NET libraries. Salsa operates by loading the .NET runtime into your Haskell process and using the FFI (and run-time code generation) to marshall calls between the .NET and Haskell runtimes. It includes a code generator and a type-level library (which uses type families) to provide type-safe access to .NET libraries in Haskell with C#-style method overload resolution and implicit conversions. maccatcher-1.0.0. Jason Dusek [14]announced the [15]maccatcher package, which obtains a MAC address on *NIX and Windows. Call for Contributions - Haskell Communities and Activities Report, November 2008 edition. Janis Voigtlaender sent out [16]call for contributions to the 15th edition of the [17]Haskell Communities & Activities Report. The submission deadline is 31 October 2008. If you are working on any project that is in some way related to Haskell, please write a short entry and submit it. Even if the project is very small or unfinished or you think it is not important enough -- please reconsider and submit an entry anyway! Data.IVar 0.1. Luke Palmer [18]announced the release of the [19]Data.IVar module, which provides write-once variables that can be blocked on in parallel. Unlike other implementations, Data.IVar does not use thread racing, since empirical tests have shown that the GHC scheduler is not quite good enough to handle thread-racing efficiently. A wiki page for managing the 6.10 handover. Don Stewart [20]announced a [21]wiki page to help with the transition to GHC 6.10. It collects the 7 or so known issues that break code with GHC 6.10. Please feel free to clean up, and especially add techniques for handling each change. GHC 6.10.1 RC 1. Ian Lynagh [22]announced [23]GHC 6.10.0.20081007, the first release candidate for GHC 6.10.1. There is also a [24]status page for GHC 6.10.1. Graphalyze-0.4 and SourceGraph-0.2. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic [25]announced the release of version 0.4 of the [26]Graphalyze library and version 0.2 of the [27]SourceGraph programme. SourceGraph is a programme designed to help you analyse the static complexity of your Haskell code when represented as a graph. These releases fix the bugs reported by Gwern Branwen, Magnus Therning, and Christopher Hinson. ListZipper-1.1.0.0. Ryan Ingram [28]announced the release of a simple list zipper library to Hackage, [29]ListZipper-1.1.0.0. darcs 2.1.0. Eric Kow [30]announced the release of [31]darcs 2.1.0. This version provides over 20 bug fixes and 7 new features since darcs 2.0.2. Most notably, the darcs-2 repository format is now the default, there is better HTTP support, and a longstanding 'pending patch' regression has been fixed. Yi 0.5.0.1. Jean-Phillipe Bernardy [32]announced the [33]0.5 release of Yi, a text editor written and extensible in Haskell. The long-term goal of the Yi project is to provide the editor of choice for Haskell programmers. Discussion OT: Haskell desktop wallpaper?. Magnus Therning [34]asked for Haskell-themed desktop wallpapers, and the community responded with quite a few nice images. Abusing quickcheck to check existential properties. Norman Ramsey [35]asked about using QuickCheck to check existential properties; suggestions involved SmallCheck and skolemization. Repair to floating point enumerations?. Malcolm Wallace began a [36]discussion on the merits of changing the (admittedly wonky) H98 [37]semantics for the Enum instances of Float and Double in Haskell Prime. A general question about the use of classes in defining interfaces. S. Doaitse Swierstra [38]asked about the feasibility of including top-level functions implemented using Applicative combinators as class methods with default implementations, to allow for the possibility of giving them more efficient implementations in specific instances. Proposal #2659: Add sortOn and friends to Data.List. Twan van Laarhoven [39]proposed adding sortOn (:: Ord b => (a -> b) -> [40]-> [a) and related functions to Data.List. Blog noise [41]Haskell news from the [42]blogosphere. * Andy Gill: [43]Pretty Printing Code with Markup. writes about a [44]new version of the HughesPJ pretty printing library which allows for pretty-printing with markup. * "FP Lunch": [45]Is purity inefficient?. Are idiomatic pure functional programs less efficient than idiomatic impure ones? * Eric Kow (kowey): [46]darcs weekly news #8. * Conal Elliott: [47]Composing memo tries. * Conal Elliott: [48]Elegant memoization with functional memo tries. * >>> Paolo Capriotti: [49]Monads for Markov chains. * Real-World Haskell: [50]Production status update: we're in QC1. * Joachim Breitner: [51]Infinite loops in Haskell. * Luke Palmer: [52]FRP Rant. * Luke Palmer: [53]data-memocombinators. * Bryan O'Sullivan: [54]Using Bloom filters for large scale gene sequence analysis in Haskell. Bryan and Ketil Malde's paper was accepted to PADL 09! * Arnar Birgisson: [55]Generating legal subsets of a dependency graph. * Creighton Hogg: [56]A silly example and a brief history. * >>> Robert Ottaway: [57]Sorting using Haskell. * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [58]Untangling with Continued Fractions: part 5. * Holumbus: [59]Source Links Are Back!. * London Haskell Users Group: [60]Getting things going again. * >>> Justin Bailey: [61]The Haskell Cheatsheet. * >>> Nathan Sanders: [62]Type-directed programming. * >>> Micah Cowan: [63]Adventures in Haskell, Part 2: Kewlness. * Manuel M T Chakravarty: [64]GpuGen: Bringing the Power of GPUs to Haskell.. * >>> Binu Raghavan: [65]Haskell.... Binu is trying to learn Haskell. * Bjoern Edstroem: [66]Let's build an MP3-decoder!. Quotes of the Week * mckinna: you don't need to produce elements of an *arbitrary* whatever-it-is when you can produce elements of the *initial* whatever-it-is * tristes_tigres: thinks that programming languages can be divided into two broad classes: functional and dysfunctional * luqui: Down with the IO bourgeoisie! Long live the purely functional proletariat * ystael: it seems like every time i switch channels over to #haskell someone is talking about launching missiles. one might be inclined to draw freudian conclusions. About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [67]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [68]the Haskell Sequence and [69]Planet Haskell. [70]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [71]haskell.org. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on [72]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get [73]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . References 1. http://haskell.org/ 2. http://learnyouahaskell.com/ 3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/46583 4. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Glob 5. http://iki.fi/matti.niemenmaa/glob/index.html 6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/46461 7. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/hledger 8. http://joyful.com/Ledger#hledger 9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/46122 10. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/CheatSheet 11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/46076 12. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Salsa 13. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Salsa 14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/46072 15. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/maccatcher 16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45967 17. http://www.haskell.org/communities/ 18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45953 19. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/data-ivar 20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/15442 21. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Upgrading_packages#Typical_breakages_with_GHC... 22. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/15376 23. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/stable/dist/6.10.1-rc-1/rc.html 24. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GHC-6.10.1 25. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16473 26. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Graphalyze 27. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/SourceGraph 28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16468 29. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/ListZipper 30. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16465 31. http://darcs.net/darcs-2.1.0.tar.gz 32. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell/2008-October/020648.html 33. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/yi 34. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45961 35. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16477 36. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/2678 37. http://haskell.org/onlinereport/basic.html#sect6.3.4 38. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/10206 39. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/10184 40. file://localhost/home/brent/haskell/hwn/a] 41. http://planet.haskell.org/ 42. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles 43. http://blog.unsafeperformio.com/?p=31 44. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/marked%2Dpretty 45. http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fplunch/weblog/?p=113 46. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/10/darcs-weekly-news-8.html 47. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/conal/~3/422189172/ 48. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/conal/~3/422171822/ 49. http://pcapriotti.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/monads-for-markov-chains/ 50. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/10/15/production-status-update-wer... 51. https://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/archives/308-Infinite-loops-in-Haskell.... 52. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/10/15/frp-rant/ 53. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/10/14/data-memocombinators/ 54. http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2008/09/28/using-bloom-filters-for-large-scal... 55. http://www.hvergi.net/2008/10/generating-legal-subsets-of-a-dependency-graph... 56. http://abstractabsurd.blogspot.com/2008/10/silly-example-and-brief-history.h... 57. http://tech-nickel.blogspot.com/2008/10/sorting-using-haskell.html 58. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/10/untangling-with-continued-fractions.html 59. http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/blog/?p=15 60. http://www.londonhug.net/2008/10/11/getting-things-going-again/ 61. http://blog.codeslower.com/2008/10/The-Haskell-Cheatsheet 62. http://sandersn.com/blog/index.php?title=type_directed_programming 63. http://micah.cowan.name/2008/10/10/computers/software-development/adventures... 64. http://justtesting.org/post/53418059 65. http://variably-volatile.blogspot.com/2008/10/haskell.html 66. http://blog.bjrn.se/2008/10/lets-build-mp3-decoder.html 67. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 68. http://sequence.complete.org/ 69. http://planet.haskell.org/ 70. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed 71. http://haskell.org/ 72. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN 73. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/