February 2003 - Haskell

Last Call: SCP Special Issue on Program Transformation; Deadline 1.4.2003
by Ralf Laemmel 16 Feb '03

16 Feb '03

Program Transformation Special Issue in the Science of Computer Programming Deadline is 1.4.2003 Find CFC attached or at http://www.cwi.nl/~ralf/pt-scp/ (Program transformation is of interest for many subscribers of this list because program transformation is crucial for the implementation of functional languages, and it is also a typical application domain of functional programming. Other keywords: Meta-programming, XML processing, refactoring.) -- Ralf Laemmel VU & CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ralf/ http://www.cwi.nl/~ralf/ Special Issue on Program Transformation Science of Computer Programming Guest Editor Ralf Lämmel Call for contributions The special issue is devoted to `program transformation' in the sense of automated program adaptation by executable transformations. Such transformations are used in software development and especially in software maintenance in various ways, e.g., for refactoring, software migration, mass maintenance, change logging, schema evolution, program specialisation, software configuration, aspect weaving, and others. The special issue seeks high-quality contributions studying the following dimensions of transformations: * formal aspects such as operator suites for transformations and their properties; * language design issues such as suitable language setups and meta-programming frameworks; * infra-structural issues such as the relation to front-ends, program analysis, interfaces; * software engineering aspects such as scaling, testing and maintaining transformations; * emerging fields such as unanticipated software evolution; * case studies such as lessons learned in large-scale transformation projects. Deadline for paper submissions: 1 April 2003 Author's notification: 1 July 2003 Special issue's publication: End of 2003 The submissions should be sent in PS or PDF to the guest editor via email. If you are not sure about the suitability of a given subject, or if you want to know more details about the special issue's intent, do not hesitate to contact the guest editor. The guest editor's email address is ralf@cwi.nl;or see the URL http://www.cwi.nl/~ralf/. For details about the policy of the Science of Computer Programming journal and the requirements for prospective authors, see a recent issue of the journal and check the journal's web site http://www.elsevier.com/locate/issn/01676423.

1 0

Talk Announcement -- Paul Hudak
by Matthew Maycock 15 Feb '03

15 Feb '03

Professor Paul Hudak of Yale University is coming to give a talk at Drexel University on Friday, Feb 21st. All are welcome. There will be a party going to dinner afterwards (530), and there will probably be some open seats in the reservation - dress nicely if you want to come (how to handle `overflow' of people wanting to come to dinner hasn't been worked out yet - but we live riskily like that over here in the almost-big city...) Details can be found at http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~tmcssoc/events.html That is all, ~Matthew Maycock

1 0

EACL03 Registration now open
by Claire Gardent 15 Feb '03

15 Feb '03

[Our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement] * CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ** CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ** CALL FOR PARTICIPATION * EACL 2003 10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics http://www.conferences.hu/EACL03/ April 12-17, 2003 Budapest, Hungary Early registration deadline : 15 March 2003 The EACL03 registration is now open. Note that early registration is a lot cheaper (for you) and provides for a better conference (because we can prepare it better). Please register before March 15th! *** CONFERENCE SCHEDULE **** Tutorials Saturday 12 April 2003 Workshops April 13-14, 2003 Main conference, Research Notes, Demos and April 15-17, 2003 Student Research Workshop April 16, 2003 * CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ** CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ** CALL FOR PARTICIPATION *

1 0

silly questions about 'seq'
by John Meacham 15 Feb '03

15 Feb '03

I have some questions about the implementation of haskell... what does it mean to apply 'seq' to a function? how does one place an abstraction in WHNF? it seems that the ONLY thing one can do to a function is apply it to some argument so does seq need to apply the function to a dummy argument or something? similarly, how does seq work on polymorphic types? without knowing what the unboxed representation is for a type, it seems tricky to know how to place it in WHNF... John -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - john(a)foo.net ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

4 4

ANNOUNCE: 0th International Obfuscated Haskell Code Contest
by Shae Matijs Erisson 14 Feb '03

14 Feb '03

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to comp.lang.functional as well. In the spirit of http://ioccc.org/ .... Bring us your poor, weary, downtrodden, and unreadable source code. Come to the 0th INTERNATIONAL OBFUSCATED HASKELL CODE CONTEST! This contest is meant to be fun, short, and not terribly serious. Also, then we'll know if a 1st IOHCC is a good idea. * submission deadline: March 1st, 2003 * send your code (and/or complaints/comments) to: mailto:iohc-jury@mgoetze.net Submission must have source and some sort of description file so that the jurors won't be totally mystified. Rules: * LICENSE: your code must an original work, all submitted programs are thereby put in the public domain. All explicitly copyrighted programs will be rejected. (see the IOCCC rules) * max source size: 5k * entry must include shell script or makefile to perform the build * build must not require human intervention * doing something interesting and/or useful is a plus * we particularly like games * limited abuse of the rules is acceptable if the specific abuses are documented, and the judges think it's cool Portability: * latest public release versions of hugs, ghc, nhc, hbc, helium acceptable (any we missed?) * may use common Haskell tools such as hmake, happy etc. * program need not be portable across Haskell implementations * must be relatively portable across platforms (i.e. no Linux-specificisms) * use of ANSI/VTxxx codes which are not limited to a specific brand of terminal and work in a standard xterm are portable * FFI is discouraged, we want real Haskell source. Five person jury: * Richard Braakman (dark) * Shae Erisson (shapr) * Ian Lynagh (Igloo) * Andrew Bromage (Pseudonym) * Manuel Chakravarty (Chilli) We expect judging to take two to three weeks, but this is the 0th IOHCC, could be shorter or longer. Awards will depend on the specific entries, but may include: * best one-liner - less than 80 chars not counting imports * best .signature sized - 4x80 or 4x76 or whatever * best game * best H98-only program * best exploit of a compiler bug * most useful program * most creative layout * best abuse of implementation-specific extensions * best abuse of the type system * best abuse of category theory * worst abuse of the rules Spirit, point, reason: * to seek out new lifeforms and new civilizations * to boldly go where no Haskell programmer has ever wanted to be! Semi-seriously, obfuscated code shows neat and unusual ways of structuring a program, cool tricks, dark nooks and crannies you've never thought of, and is generally a good way to shake off all that software discipline and stomp around in the muddy world of spaghetti code for a quick vacation. -- Shae Matijs Erisson - 2 days older than RFC0226 #haskell on irc.freenode.net - We Put the Funk in Funktion

2 2

WAIT 2003: Call For Papers
by WAIT 2003 14 Feb '03

14 Feb '03

---------------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS 32 JAIIO - WAIT 2003 Argentinian Workshop on Theoretical Computer Science Buenos Aires - Argentina September 1-5, 2003 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Argentinian Workshop on Theoretical Computer Science (WAIT) has become an important Latin American forum for the exchange of ideas and the presentation of research in theoretical computer science and its applications. The workshop aims are to build a bridge between academic and applied research and to stimulate the exchange of ideas and experience between theory and practise in computer science. The meeting includes contributed and invited talks, and tutorials. Further, we are very pleased to announce that there will be a special issue of ENTCS (http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/entcs) dedicated to WAIT 2003 publishing a selection of outstanding contributions. WAIT 2003 (http://wait2003.famaf.unc.edu.ar) the 7-th workshop in the series, will be held in Buenos Aires during September 1-5 (2003) as part of the 32-nd Argentinian Conference on Informatics and Operations Research (32 JAIIO, http://www.jaiio2003.uade.edu.ar) Buenos Aires (http://www.buenosaires.gov.ar/areas/turismo/en/) is a cosmopolitan and modern urban centre easily accessible by plane from most mayor cities in the world. The city is characterised by the multiplicity of its artistic expressions, ranging from the great assortment of sculptures and monuments to streets and corners that surprise with their allegorical reliefs and murals. The climate of Buenos Aires ---oceanic and warm--- is mild all year round, allowing visitors to discover the city on foot in any season. The city offers all categories of accommodation, and food ---which is something of a cult--- is of high quality. TOPICS Submissions are welcome in all fields of Theoretical Computer Science. Specific topics of WAIT 2003 include (but are not limited to): * Logical and algebraic foundations of computer science (logics for computation, category theory, relation algebras, type theory); * Formal methods (formal specification of sequential and concurrent programs, analysis, verification and transformation of programs, model checking); * Algorithms and data structures (sequential, parallel, distributed and on-line computing, probabilistic algorithms); * Automata theory and computational complexity; * Symbolic and algebraic computation; * Quantum Computing; * Bioinformatics. Submissions are expected to contain original research and will be refereed by international experts. Research papers must contain previously unpublished results. They will be judged on the base of originality and importance of their contributions and clarity of presentation. Papers should not exceed 12 pages, including figures and references. PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Martin Abadi (University of California at Santa Cruz) Gilles Barthe (INRIA Sophia-Antipolis) Gabriel Baum (Universidad de La Plata) Veronica Becher (Universidad de Buenos Aires) Vincent Danos (CNRS, Paris VII) Peter Dybjer (University of Gothenburg) Roberto Di Cosmo (PPS, Paris VII) Esteban Feuerstein (Universidad de Buenos Aires) Marcelo Fiore (Cambridge University) (co-chair) Daniel Fridlender (Universidad de Cordoba) (co-chair) Joos Heintz (Universidad de Buenos Aires) Gonzalo Navarro (Universidad de Chile) Peter O'Hearn (QMW, University of London) Alfredo Viola (Universidad de la Republica) IMPORTANT DATES: Deadline for reception of papers.................................May 4 Notification of acceptance.....................................June 27 Deadline for reception of the final version....................July 18 INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS: To facilitate the dissemination of papers and results, authors are invited to submit their papers in English. However, papers in Spanish or Portuguese are also welcome. Accepted contributions will be published in the Proceedings of the 32 JAIIO. Further, a selection of outstanding contributions will be invited to be published (in English) in a special issue of ENTCS dedicated to WAIT 2003. Papers should respond to ENTCS format (obtainable from http://math.tulane.edu/~entcs/) or similar, and must be submitted electronically in PostScript format (ghostview-readable) or PDF to the following e-mail address: wait2003(a)famaf.unc.edu.ar. Authors should communicate in a separate e-mail (in ASCII format) the title of the paper together with a short abstract, name and affiliation of all co-authors and their e-mail addresses, phone and FAX numbers. The message should also contain a list of keywords describing the area of the paper. ----------------------------------------------------------------------

1 0

RE: Yet another weakly defined bug report
by Simon Marlow 14 Feb '03

14 Feb '03

> What is the limit on open files, and why? I think it'd be nice to > just schedule a huge amount of IO operations, and have them all be > performed when required (i.e. when the FM is first accessed). > Apparently, my addDir took the trouble to open the files, but not > generate the FMs -- any idea why? The limit is imposed by the OS, and is usally tunable. Try 'ulimit -a' on a Unix box (the command might be different depending on your shell; check the manpage). readFile must *open* the file strictly, because it has to raise an exception if any errors occur. But thereafter, all reading is done lazilly. If you also want the open to be lazy, then use unsafePerformIO. It's Your Funeral, as we say in GHC land ;-) Cheers, Simon

1 0

RE: Yet another weakly defined bug report
by Simon Marlow 14 Feb '03

14 Feb '03

> > These things are always tricky to understand, which is why > I recommend > > not using lazy I/O. File reading is not a pure operation: > running out > > of file descriptors is a good counter-example. > > Without saying wether I agree with lazy I/O or not, I suggest that > this particular problem may also be due to the runtime implementation: > If one tries to open a new file but the file descriptors are > exhausted, > the runtime system should first trigger a full GC because that might > free up some descriptors -- but maybe GHC is already doing this? GHC could do this, but it doesn't. Nevertheless, it wouldn't help in Ketil's example: no amount of GC is going to free up the file descriptors which are being held on to because the program hasn't completely evaluated the file contents yet. Cheers, Simon

1 0

FSTTCS'03 First Call for Papers (postscript version is attached)
by FSTTCS 13 Feb '03

13 Feb '03

[Our apologies if you receive this more than once.] ====================================================================== CALL FOR PAPERS 23rd conference on FOUNDATIONS OF SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY AND THEORETICAL COMPUTER SCIENCE (FSTTCS '03) December 15--17, 2003 Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India ===================================================================== The Indian Association for Research in Computing Science, IARCS, announces the 23nd Annual FSTTCS Conference in Mumbai. The FSTTCS conference is a forum for presenting original results in foundational aspects of Computer Science and Software Technology. The conference proceedings are published by Springer-Verlag as Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Authors are invited to submit papers presenting original and unpublished research in any area of Theoretical Computer Science or Foundational aspects of Software Technology. Representative areas include, but are not limited to: Automata, Languages and Computability Automated Reasoning, Rewrite Systems, and Applications Combinatorial Optimization Computational Geometry Computational Biology Complexity Theory Concurrency Theory Cryptography and Security Protocols Database Theory and Information Retrieval Data Structures Graph and Network Algorithms Implementation of Algorithms Logic, Proof Theory, Model Theory and Applications Logics of Programs and Temporal Logics New Models of Computation Parallel and Distributed Computing Programming language design Randomized and Approximation Algorithms Real-time and Hybrid Systems Semantics of Programming Languages Software Specification and Verification Static Analysis and Type Systems Theory of Functional and Constraint-based Programming In addition, there will be workshops at IIT Bombay following FSTTCS'03 on some current areas of research (topics to be announced on the conference web page). The following two conferences on related areas will be also be held in Mumbai between 9 and 13 December 2003: International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP'03) and ASIAN'03. Submission Guidelines ===================== Authors may submit drafts of full papers or extended abstracts. Submissions are limited to 12 pages in LNCS style (see the conference site for full details). Proofs omitted due to space constraints may be put into a clearly marked appendix. Electronic submission is very strongly recommended. For details, please look at the conference site: http://www.fsttcs.org For an accepted paper to be included in the proceedings, one of the authors must commit to presenting the paper at the conference. Important Dates =============== Submission deadline: 1 July 2003 Notification: 15 August 2003 Final Version due: 15 September 2003 Conference Site: http://www.fsttcs.org/ ================ Program Committee: ================== R Alur (University of Pennsylvania) V Arvind (IMSc, Chennai) M Charikar (Princeton University) T Dey (Ohio State University) J Esparza (University of Stuttgart) S Ghosh (TIFR, Mumbai) M Halldorsson (University of Iceland) J Radhakrishnan (TIFR, Mumbai, co-chair) H Karloff (AT&T Labs--Research) K Lodaya (IMSc, Chennai) PB Miltersen (BRICS, Aarhus) J Mitchell (Stanford) P O'Hearn (Queen Mary, London) PK Pandya (TIFR, Mumbai, co-chair) S Prasad (IIT Delhi) SK Rajamani (Microsoft research, Redmond) S Sen (IIT Delhi) D Sivakumar (IBM, Almaden) G Sivakumar (IIT Bombay) Th Wilke (University of Kiel) U Zwick (Tel Aviv University) Communication: ============== Attn: FSTTCS School of Technology and Computer Science Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai 400 005 India fsttcs(a)tifr.res.in Phone: +91 22 2215 2971 Fax: +91 22 2215 2110

1 0

Re: Learning Haskell moved
by Matthew Donadio 13 Feb '03

13 Feb '03

>> I would add some significant papers, such as John Hughes' >> "Why functional programming matters", etc. > >I've added that paper to the introduction. Other suggestions are welcome. "Conception, Evolution, and Application of Functional Programming Languages", Paul Hudak, ACM Computing Surveys, Volume 21, Number 3, pp.359-411, 1989 This would probably be good, too. --Matthew Donadio (m.p.donadio(a)ieee.org)

1 0