--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haskell Weekly News http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080920 Issue 86 - September 20, 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to issue 86 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community. Lots of NEW stuff this week! A new generics library, new versions of Pandoc and darcs, a new website for xmonad, a new GADT/type family inference engine for GHC, a Haskell binding for Qt, and some new, astonishingly elegant ideas from Oleg. Also, here's hoping that everyone has a lot of fun at ICFP! Announcements GHC version control. Simon Peyton-Jones [2]sent out a revised proposal for GHC version control. darcs 2.0.3pre1. Eric Kow [3]announced the first pre-release of [4]darcs 2.0.3, featuring a few major bug fixes and a handful of interesting features. EMGM. Sean Leather [5]announced a release of [6]Extensible and Modular Generics for the Masses (EMGM), a library for generic programming in Haskell using type classes. Pandoc 1.0.0.1. John MacFarlane [7]announced the release of [8]pandoc 1.0.0.1, the swiss army knife of text markup formats. Iteratee-based IO. oleg [9]described a [10]safe, declarative approach to input processing which will be the subject of a talk at DEFUN08 on September 27. MetaHDBC paper. Mads Lindstroem [11]announced a [12]draft version of a paper about the [13]MetaHDBC library, which uses Template Haskell to do type-safe database access. Comments are welcomed, especially about the overall quality of the paper, whether it can be called scientific, and anything Mads could do to improve the paper. qtHaskell 1.1.2. David Harley [14]announced a second preview release of [15]qtHaskell, a set of Haskell bindings for Trolltech's Qt. Discussion Library design question. Andre Nathan [16]asked for advice on designing a simple graph library. The resulting discussion included an analysis of using the State monad versus a more functional approach. A round of golf. Creighton Hogg [17]learns about laziness by [18]making grown men cry. XML (HXML) parsing :: GHC 6.8.3 space leak from 2000. Lev Walkin [19]discovers a nice example of an obscure class of space leaks while writing some XML-processing code, prompting an in-depth analysis by Simon Marlow. Proofs and commercial code. Daryoush Mehrtash [20]asked about automated proof tools and techniques, and their uses in the real world. Blog noise [21]Haskell news from the [22]blogosphere. * Creighton Hogg: [23]Haskell Cafe or: How I learned to stop worrying & love laziness. * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [24]Animal as RDR, part II. Doug continues his posts on RDR expert systems. * Ivan Lazar Miljenovic: [25]Getting Real World Haskell Down Under. * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [26]Animal: an RDR implementation study. Doug describes "ripple-down rules" expert systems, and illustrates the types needed to encode one in Haskell. * Mark Jason Dominus: [27]data Mu f = In (f (Mu f)). Mark writes about fixpoints of type constructors. * John Goerzen (CosmicRay): [28]Switched from KDE to xmonad. John has taken the plunge to xmonad and seems to like it so far! * Eric Kow (kowey): [29]darcs weekly news #4. Pre-release of darcs 2.0.3; darcs hacking sprint next month; code.haskell.org upgrades to darcs 2; and other news. * Mads Lindstroem: [30]MetaHDBC paper (draft). Mads's first paper ever, on using Template Haskell for type-safe database access. Comments welcome! * Braden Shepherdson: [31]xmonad-light 0.8 Released. * Manuel M T Chakravarty: [32]GHC HEAD just got a new inference engine for GADTs and type families.. * Magnus Therning: [33]Haskell and Time. Magnus describes the solution to a problem with Data.Time. * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [34]Two Papers and a Presentation. * Xmonad: [35]New xmonad website launched. xmonad has a shiny new website! Quotes of the Week * Botje: GHC 11 will have shootout entries as primitives. * wjt: oh, i see what you're doing. ...no, i don't. *splode* * Benjamin Pierce: [on existential types] I have a term, and it has a type. So there. * bos: come on, real programmers use "(((,) <$>) .) . (<*>)" * quicksilver: #haskell : Sometimes we answer your question, sometimes we lay hideous traps which will devour your soul. It's a risk you take. * harrison: [on computing 1000000!] it is the same as factorial 999999 * 1000000, big deal About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [36]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [37]the Haskell Sequence and [38]Planet Haskell. [39]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [40]haskell.org. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on [41]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get [42]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . References 1. http://haskell.org/ 2. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/libraries/2008-September/010661.html 3. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047664.html 4. http://www.darcs.net/darcs-2.0.3pre1.tar.gz 5. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047751.html 6. http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/GenericProgramming/EMGM 7. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047437.html 8. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/pandoc 9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44828 10. http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/Iteratee/ 11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44713 12. http://lindstroem.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/metahdbc.pdf 13. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/MetaHDBC 14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16425 15. http://qthaskell.berlios.de/ 16. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44733 17. http://abstractabsurd.blogspot.com/2008/09/haskell-cafe-or-how-i-learned-to-... 18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44724 19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44708 20. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047440.html 21. http://planet.haskell.org/ 22. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles 23. http://abstractabsurd.blogspot.com/2008/09/haskell-cafe-or-how-i-learned-to-... 24. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/09/animal-as-rdr-part-ii.html 25. http://ivanmiljenovic.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/getting-real-world-haskell-do... 26. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/09/animal-rdr-implementation-study.htm... 27. http://blog.plover.com/prog/springschool95-2.html 28. http://changelog.complete.org/posts/756-Switched-from-KDE-to-xmonad.html 29. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/09/darcs-weekly-news-4.html 30. http://lindstroem.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/metahdbc-paper-draft/ 31. http://braincrater.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/xmonad-light-08-released/ 32. http://justtesting.org/post/50500880 33. http://therning.org/magnus/archives/389 34. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/09/two-papers-and-presentation.html 35. http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/new-xmonad-website-launched/ 36. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 37. http://sequence.complete.org/ 38. http://planet.haskell.org/ 39. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed 40. http://haskell.org/ 41. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN 42. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/