November 2005 - Haskell

ANNOUNCEMENT: HAskell Server Pages version 0.4.0
by Lemmih 18 Nov '05

18 Nov '05

== HAskell Server Pages == HASP is an experimental framework for combining the flexibility of Haskell with the popularity/necessity of web-pages. HASP offers an embedded XML syntax without dispensing with the Glasgow Haskell extensions we hold dear. By using the FastCGI library, HASP is independent of webserver type, and keeps maximum performance. HASP supports sessions, POST data and file uploads, persistent values of arbitrary types, dynamic loading of Haskell code, and thus provides a sound foundation for higher level programming models for dynamic web-pages. Changes since 0.3.0: * Use the bytecode generator from GHC instead of hs-plugins. * Removed the need for Alex, Happy, plugins, ghc-src, trhsp and haspr-config. Changes from Niklas Broberg's original HSP: * GHC bytecode instead of hs-plugins. * Dropped the support for Harp. * Dropped the support for xml in patterns. * Full support for every GHC extension. * HASP uses FastCGI where HSP implements its own web server. HASP: darcs get http://scannedinavian.org/~lemmih/hasp HSP: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~d00nibro/hsp/ FastCgi: http://fastcgi.com/ -- Friendly, Lemmih

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Haskell Weekly News: November 15, 2005
by John Goerzen 18 Nov '05

18 Nov '05

Haskell Weekly News: November 15, 2005 Greetings, and thanks for reading the 15th issue of HWN, a weekly newsletter for the Haskell community. Each Tuesday, new editions will be posted (as text) to [1]the Haskell mailing list and (as HTML) to [2]The Haskell Sequence. 1. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 2. http://sequence.complete.org/ New Releases * York Haskell Compiler. Thomas Davie [3]announced the York Haskell Compiler project, which already has working code. Quite a few people chimed in with questions. 3. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12485 Discussion Making Haskell more open. Simon Peyton-Jones began a [4]long thread with some ideas about making Haskell more open to the wider community. The thread is too long to completely summarize here, and branched out in several directions, including a [5]discussion of the haskell.org homepage. 4. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12479 5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12533 Haskell users survey. John Hughes [6]wrote about a web-based survey about Haskell. He is encouraging everyone with an interest in Haskell to participate. 6. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12448 Darcs Corner Darcs 1.0.4 was [7]released this week. There are quite a few performance improvements, a new posthook option, manifest feature, new "darcs put" command, more git support, and various bugfixes. 7. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/8706 Quote of the Week "Impossible things are delayed immediately. Miracles may take a little longer." -- Claus Reinke on haskell-cafe. About Haskell Weekly News Yes, it's late again. But, while I am no Zaphod Beeblebrox, carry no towel, have no Improbability Drive, and certainly couldn't have come up with 42 on my own, if Douglas Adam's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe" series can still be called a trilogy, then HWN can still be called weekly :-) Want to continue reading HWN? Please help us create new editions of this newsletter. Please see the [8]contributing information, or send stories to hwn -at- complete -dot- org. There is also a Darcs repository available. 8. http://sequence.complete.org/hwn-contrib

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kernel 2.6.11 and readline.so
by Irina Kaliman 18 Nov '05

18 Nov '05

I wonder if anybody knows the answer to this: I have Fedora Core 4 ( 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp ) installed on one of our servers. When I tried to install ghc-6.4-1, I got a dependancy problem: # rpm -ivh ghc-6.4-1.i386.rpm error: Failed dependencies: libreadline.so.4 is needed by ghc-6.4-1.i386 I have /usr/lib/libreadline.so.5 which is a part of my distribution. ( Fedora Core 4 , no updates ) on this machine On my ther machine, which is 2.4.20-6, this package was installed with no probelms Thank you for your help, ********************************************************* Irina Kaliman, System Administrator University of Miami, Computer Science Department e-mail: irina(a)miami.edu

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Compiling wxHaskell from source?
by Deling Ren 18 Nov '05

18 Nov '05

Hi there, is there anyone out there having luck with compiling wxHaskell from source on Debian? My Debian version is 3.1, ghc 6.4.1 from sid. wxWidgets 2.6.3. wxHaskell version is 0.9.4. gcc version is 4.0.3. I got the following error messages when trying to run "make". I would really appreciate if you could share some experiences. Thanks. Deling g++ -c wxc/src/ewxw_main.cpp -o out/wxc/ewxw_main.o -MD -I/usr/lib/wx/ include/gtk2-unicode-release-2.6 -I/usr/include/wx-2.6 - DGTK_NO_CHECK_CASTS -D__WXGTK__ -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGE_FILES -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE=1 -DNO_GCC_PRAGMA -Iwxc/include In file included from wxc/src/ewxw_main.cpp:1: wxc/include/wrapper.h: In constructor ` ELJDragDataObject::ELJDragDataObject(void*, char*, int (*) (void*), int (*)(void*, void*), int (*)(void*, int, const void*))': wxc/include/wrapper.h:173: error: no matching function for call to ` wxDataObjectSimple::wxDataObjectSimple(char*&)' /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/dataobj.h:249: error: candidates are: wxDataObjectSimple::wxDataObjectSimple(const wxDataObjectSimple&) /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/dataobj.h:203: error: wxDataObjectSimple::wxDataObjectSimple(const wxDataFormat&) wxc/include/wrapper.h: In constructor ` ELJTextValidator::ELJTextValidator(void*, void*, void*, long int)': wxc/include/wrapper.h:257: error: ambiguous overload for 'operator=' in ' this->ELJTextValidator::buf = _txt' /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/string.h:626: error: candidates are: wxString& wxString::operator=(int) <near match> /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/string.h:846: error: wxString& wxString::operator=(wchar_t) <near match> /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/string.h:860: error: wxString& wxString::operator=(const wxWCharBuffer&) <near match> /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/string.h:915: error: wxString& wxString::operator=(const wxString&) <near match> wxc/include/wrapper.h: At global scope: wxc/include/wrapper.h:331: error: conflicting return type specified for ` virtual char* ELJConnection::OnRequest(const wxString&, const wxString&, int*, wxIPCFormat)' /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/ipcbase.h:86: error: overriding `virtual wxChar* wxConnectionBase::OnRequest(const wxString&, const wxString&, int*, wxIPCFormat)' wxc/include/wrapper.h: In constructor `ELJConnection::ELJConnection (char*, int) ': wxc/include/wrapper.h:301: error: no matching function for call to ` wxTCPConnection::wxTCPConnection(char*&, int&)' /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/sckipc.h:106: error: candidates are: wxTCPConnection::wxTCPConnection(const wxTCPConnection&) /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/sckipc.h:65: error: wxTCPConnection::wxTCPConnection() /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/sckipc.h:64: error: wxTCPConnection::wxTCPConnection(wxChar*, int) wxc/include/wrapper.h: In constructor `ELJPrintout::ELJPrintout (void*, void*, void*, void*, void*, void*, void*, void*, void*, void*)': wxc/include/wrapper.h:413: error: conversion from `char*' to `const wxString' is ambiguous /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/string.h:643: error: candidates are: wxString::wxString(wchar_t, unsigned int) <near match> /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/string.h:632: error: wxString::wxString(int) <near match> wxc/include/wrapper.h: In constructor `ELJPreviewFrame::ELJPreviewFrame(void*, void*, void*, void*, void*, void*, void*, int, int, int, int, int)': wxc/include/wrapper.h:475: error: conversion from `char*' to `const wxString' is ambiguous /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/string.h:643: error: candidates are: wxString::wxString(wchar_t, unsigned int) <near match> /usr/include/wx-2.6/wx/string.h:632: error: wxString::wxString(int) <near match> wxc/include/wrapper.h: At global scope: wxc/include/wrapper.h:534: error: invalid type `const char[11]' for default argument to `const wxString&' make: *** [out/wxc/ewxw_main.o] Error 1 Exit 2

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PhD position at the CWI, Amsterdam
by F.S.de.Boer＠cwi.nl 17 Nov '05

17 Nov '05

Position Description ==================== The Coordination and Component Based Software group in SEN3 at CWI has an open position for a PhD student (OIO) for four years. The PhD student will perform research in the context of the BSIK project BRICKS (Basic Research in Informatics for Creating the Knowledge Society). BRICKS addresses the need for a strong impulse in fundamental research in informatics. The participation of SEN3 in BRICKS focuses on the component-based development of large software systems. These components can be viewed as the basic building blocks out of which larger software systems can be constructed, by composing the components together within large networks. Since components in an application are supposed to be highly independent of each other and of their environment, it is the responsibility of their connecting network to coordinate their individual activities to ensure their proper co-operation with one another to form a coherent whole. Aside from its clear advantages in construction of traditional complex software, this approach is a vital necessity in the development and deployment of software for an emerging class of systems that cater to ubiquitous computing and mobile applications. These systems must always be on and cannot be shut down or rebooted for software upgrade or configuration adjustments. On the other hand, they must change in reaction to the changes in their environment, such as evolving user requirements or relocation. Incremental, dynamic composition of software out of components is the only way to accommodate the requirements of such systems. The component networks of these applications are typically active in that their various connections will vary and change at run time, reflecting the dynamic changes in the communication structure of their components. The main aim of the present PhD research project is the development of compositional methods, tools, and formal techniques for the dynamic composition of components, the validation of their composition, and the validation of components themselves. The candidate for the PhD position should have a masters degree in computer science or mathematics, with a clear interest in questions in the field of theoretical computer science. Ideally, the candidate has a background in such topics in theoretical computer science as automata theory, semantics and proof theory. The Theme SEN3 (http://www.cwi.nl/sen3) at CWI is a dynamic group of internationally recognized researchers who work on Coordination Models and Languages and Component-Based Software Composition. The activity in SEN3 is a productive, healthy mix of theoretical, foundational, and experimental work in Computer Science, ranging in a spectrum covering mathematical foundations of models of computation, formal methods and semantics, implementation of advanced research software systems, as well as their real-life applications. General information =================== CWI is an internationally renowned research institute in mathematics and computer science, located in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The focus is on fundamental research problems, derived from societal needs. Research is carried out in 15 research themes. More information about these themes can be found on the website www.cwi.nl where you can also take a look at our Annual Reports. A substantial part of this research is carried out in the framework of national or international programs. CWI maintains excellent relations with industry and the academic world, at home as well as abroad. After their research careers at CWI, an increasing number of young staff members find employment in these sectors, for example in spin-off companies that are based on research results from CWI. Of course, library and computing facilities at CWI are first-rate. CWI's non-scientific services to its personnel include career planning, training & courses, assistance in finding housing, and tailor-made solutions to problems that may occasionally arise. Terms of employment =================== The salary is in accordance with the "CAO-onderzoekinstellingen" and is commensurate with experience. The starting salary for a first year PhD student is around 1850 Euros/month with an incremental raise for each subsequent year. Besides the salary, CWI offers very attractive and flexible terms of employment, like a collective health insurance, pension-fund, etc. Application =========== For more information on these vacancies you can contact either of the PIs: F. Arbab, telephone +31-20-5924056, e-mail Farhad.Arbab(a)cwi.nl F.S. de Boer, telephone +31-20-592-4139, email F.S.de.Boer(a)cwi.nl Official applications, together with curriculum vitae, letters of references, and lists of publications must be sent to Mrs. J. Koster, head of Personnel Department, P.O. box 94079, 1090 GB Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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ANN: Blobs diagram editor
by Malcolm Wallace 17 Nov '05

17 Nov '05

Blobs diagram editor -------------------- We are pleased to announce the official launch of the 'Blobs' diagram editor project. http://haskell.org/Blobs Many people will already have seen the 'Dazzle' application presented in a paper at the Haskell Workshop in Tallinn in October 2005. Lots of you wanted the source code to play with, but unfortunately the Bayesian analysis algorithms in Dazzle are proprietary, so Dazzle is available only as a precompiled binary. However, the authors of Dazzle, Arjan van IJzendoorn and Martijn Schrage, have separated out the diagram editor front-end of their application, and made it freely available to the community. The basic editing functionality has since been extended and improved, and now we are throwing open the project to all potential contributors. A diagram editor is a basic part of many different applications, and we would like to see Blobs become a standard shared component that allows different applications to share improvements to the GUI, whilst retaining separate back-end algorithms that operate on the underlying graph data structures. The design of Blobs is therefore open to any change which would improve its generality and suitability for multiple re-targeting. The code is made available in a darcs repository, and is licensed like the wxWidgets toolkit on which it is based (i.e. LGPL, with a special exemption permitting binary-only redistribution.) There is a new mailing list for contributors and users of Blobs: http://haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/blobs Regards, Malcolm

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Making Haskell more open
by Simon Peyton-Jones 17 Nov '05

17 Nov '05

Dear Haskell folk One thing that hit me forcibly during ICFP in Tallinn, and the associated workshops, is that the Haskell community may not be as good as (say) the Perl community at engaging and involving the people "in the trenches" [PRL]. Haskell.org is centrally maintained by a couple of (excellent) people; GHC is still over-dependent on Simon and me; we don't yet have a good central site for offering libraries; and so on. Things are changing. For example: - The bi-annual Haskell Communities and Activities Report is well established [HCAR] - The Haskell Wiki [WIKI] and the Haskell IRC channel [IRC] are thriving - The MonadReader [MR], the Haskell Sequence [HS], and Haskell Weekly News [HWN] are acting as great community glue - [This isn't new, but people often remark how friendly the Haskell mailings lists are.] On the implementation front: - Lots of people are working on libraries (though much remains to be done) - Work on libraries should become much easier once Cabal and Hackage [CAB] become well established - Work is afoot to move GHC's source-code repository to Darcs, to make it easier for people to contribute patches However, I still wonder if there are things we could do that would make it easier for people to contribute. Here are two concrete suggestions: - Make it possible for people to add comments, explanations, or questions to * The GHC user manual [currently generated using DocBook] * The Haskell 98 Report The idea would be that anyone could help improve these documents, and that, at least in the case of the GHC user manual, we could use the comments to help clarify the text. Some other systems do this e.g. MySql [MySQL] and PostgreSQL [PSQL] do this (the links are to random pages showing comments). One possibility: create a tree of wiki pages mirroring structure of the manual, with links from latter to the former. Issues include: propagating comments forward to following changes to the manual. But basically we have no clue about the best way to do this. - Make the entire haskell.org site into a Wiki, so that everyone can contribute news items, instructional material (Wikibooks?), comments, discussion groups, tools, etc. John and Olaf do a great job of updating haskell.org, but there is a real limit on what a couple of individuals can do in their spare time. Does anyone have experience of a larger-scale Wiki like this? (A few people have mentioned MediaWiki to me [MW], but I know nothing about it.) How would we make sure it stayed organised? And avoid getting screwed up by malicious folk? The important thing is that these mechanisms should work without any central intervention. These are just two suggestions. Perhaps there are other such mechanisms that we could put in place. Ideas? Many of you will know much more about this kind of thing than I do. Share your wisdom with the mailing list. Lastly, when it comes down to it, none of these things will happen unless some people volunteer to push them forward. Would any of you like to contribute your time and expertise? Simon [PRL] http://perl.com, http://www.perlmonks.org [HCAR] http://www.haskell.org/communities/ [WIKI] http://haskell.org/hawiki [IRC] http://haskell.org/hawiki/HaskellIrcChannel [MR] http://haskell.org/hawiki/TheMonadReader [HS] http://sequence.complete.org/ [HWN] http://sequence.complete.org/hwn [CAB] http://www.haskell.org/cabal/ [MW] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki [MSQL] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/upgrading-from-4-1.html (see bottom of page) [PSQL] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/interactive/installation.html

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The Haskell mailing list
by Simon Peyton-Jones 16 Nov '05

16 Nov '05

Folks Can anyone remember when the Haskell mailing list first opened? Does anyone have an archive that goes right back to the beginning? Simon

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MPC 2006 First Call for Papers
by Tarmo Uustalu 16 Nov '05

16 Nov '05

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS 8th International Conference on Mathematics of Program Construction MPC '06 colocated with AMAST '06 Kuressaare, Estonia, 3-5 July 2006 http://cs.ioc.ee/mpc-amast06/mpc/ Background The biennial MPC conferences aim to promote the development of mathematical principles and techniques that are demonstrably useful and usable in the process of constructing computer programs. Topics of interest range from algorithmics to support for program construction in programming languages and systems. The previous conferences were held in Twente, The Netherlands (1989), Oxford, UK (1992), Kloster Irsee, Germany (1995), Marstrand, Sweden (1998), Ponte de Lima, Portugal (2000), Dagstuhl, Germany (2002) and Stirling, UK (2004, colocated with AMAST '04). The 2006 conference will be held at Kuressaare, Estonia, colocated with AMAST '06. Invited speakers To be announced. Important dates * Submission of abstracts: 27 January 2006 * Submission of full papers: 3 February 2006 * Notification of authors: 17 March 2006 * Camera-ready version: 14 April 2006 Submission Submission is in two stages. Abstracts (plain text) must be submitted by 27 January 2006. Full papers (pdf) adhering to the llncs style must be submitted by 3 February 2006. The web-based submission system will open in early December 2005. Papers must report previously unpublished work and not be submitted concurrently to another conference with refereed proceedings. Accepted papers must be presented at the conference by one of the authors. The proceedings of MPC '06 will be published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series of Springer-Verlag. After the conference, the authors of the best papers will be invited to submit revised versions to a special issue of the Science of Computer Programming journal of Elsevier. Programme committee Tarmo Uustalu, Inst. of Cybernetics, Tallinn (chair) Roland Backhouse, Univ. of Nottingham Eerke Boiten, Univ. of Kent Venanzio Capretta, Univ. of Ottawa Sharon Curtis, Oxford Brookes Univ. Jules Desharnais, Univ. de Laval Jeremy Gibbons, Univ. of Oxford Lindsay Groves, Victoria Univ. of Wellington Ian Hayes, Univ. of Queensland William Harrison, Univ. of Missouri Johan Jeuring, Universiteit Utrecht Dexter Kozen, Cornell Univ. Christian Lengauer, Univ. Passau Lambert Meertens, Kestrel Inst. Bernhard Möller, Univ. Augsburg Shin-Cheng Mu, Univ. of Tokyo José Oliveira, Univ. do Minho Alberto Pardo, Univ. de la República Ross Paterson, City Univ. London Ingrid Rewitzky, Univ. of of Stellenbosch Varmo Vene, Univ. of Tartu Venue Kuressaare (pop. 16000) is the main town on Saaremaa, the second-largest island of the Baltic Sea. Kuressaare is a charming seaside resort on the shores of the Gulf of Riga highly popular with Estonians as well as visitors to Estonia. The scientific sessions of MPC/AMAST 2006 will take place at Saaremaa Spa Hotel Meri, one among the several new spa hotels in the town. The social events will involve a number of sites, including the 14th-century episcopal castle. Accommodation will be at Saaremaa Spa Hotels Meri and Rüütli. To get to Kuressaare and away, one must pass through Tallinn (pop. 402000), Estonia's capital city. Tallinn is famous for its picturesque medieval Old Town, inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List. Local organizers MPC/AMAST 2006 is organized by Institute of Cybernetics, a research institute of Tallinn Univ. of Technology. The local organizers are Tarmo Uustalu (chair), Monika Perkmann, Juhan Ernits, Ando Saabas, Olha Shkaravska, Kristi Uustalu. Contact email address: mpc06(at)cs.ioc.ee.

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CFP: M4M-4 Program and Call for Participation
by Holger Schlingloff 16 Nov '05

16 Nov '05

Apologies if you recieve this call for participation more than once. Methods for Modalities - CALL FOR PARTICIPATION The workshop "Methods for Modalities" (M4M) aims to bring together researchers interested in developing algorithms, verification methods and tools based on modal logic. Here the term "modal logics" is conceived broadly, including description logic, guarded fragments, conditional logic, temporal and hybrid logic, etc. This year's M4M will take place in Berlin - Adlershof, Germany. It is hosted by FIRST, the Fraunhofer Institute of Computer Architecture and Software Technology, in collaboration with the computer science institute of Humboldt University. The workshop dates are December 1st and 2nd, 2005. THIS IS IN TWO WEEKS! The conference fee of 160 Euros includes the excursion with conference dinner, which will take us at Dec 1st onto a beautiful boat cruising the illuminated nightly waterways of Germany's capital. Registration is now open at http://m4m.loria.fr/M4M4/workshop.html To encourage broad participation of young researchers, posters and system demos are still accepted for presentation. For more information, see the conference web site. See you in Berlin! The Methods For Modalities Organization Team. __________________________________________________________________ The following people have agreed to give invited lectures: François Laroussinie, ENS Cachan and CNRS. Title: Timed Modal Logics for the Verification of Real-Time Systems. Martin Lange, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. Title: Temporal Logics for Non-Regular Properties Wim Martens, Hasselt University. Title: The Typechecking Problem for XML Transformations. Boris Motik, Universität Karlsruhe. Title: Description Logics and Disjunctive Datalog - More Than just a Fleeting Resemblance?. Boris Konev, University of Liverpool. Title: Theory and Practice of Theorem Proving for Monodic First-Order Temporal Logic. Uwe Scheffler, Humboldt Universität. Title: Vague is Modal and Predicate Modifying. __________________________________________________________________ The following is the list of accepted papers: Franz Baader, Carsten Lutz and Boontawee Suntisrivaraporn: Is Tractable Reasoning in Extensions of the Description Logic EL Useful in Practice? Thomas Bolander and Torben Braüner: Two Tableau-Based Decision Procedures for Hybrid Logic Davide Bresolin and Angelo Montanari: A tableau-based decision procedure for a branching-time interval temporal logic Yegor Bryukhov: Automatic proof search in logic of justified common knowledge Mika Cohen and Mads Dam: A Completeness Result for BAN Logic Massimo Franceschet and Enrico Zimuel: Modal logic and navigational XPath: an experimental comparison Regis Gascon: Verifying qualitative and quantitative properties with LTL over concrete domains Laura Giordano, Valentina Gliozzi, Nicola Olivetti and Camilla Schwind: Extensions of Tableau calculi for preference-based conditional logics Johan W. Klüwer and Arild Waaler: Natural deduction for belief "at most" Mathis Kretz, Gerhard Jäger and Thomas Studer: Cut-free axiomatizations for stratified modal fixed point logic Martin Mundhenk, Thomas Schneider, Thomas Schwentick and Volker Weber: Complexity of Hybrid Logics over Transitive Frames Nicola Olivetti and Gian Luca Pozzato: KLMLean 1.0, a Theorem Prover for Logics of Default Reasoning Evangelos Tzanis: Hybrid Logic with operations on nominals Wouter van Atteveldt and Stefan Schlobach: A Modal View on Polder Politics Dirk Walther: ATEL with Common and Distributed Knowledge is ExpTime-Complete Evgeny Zolin: Query answering based on modal correspondence theory __________________________________________________________________

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