October 2008 - Haskell

Announcing Djinn, version 2004-12-11, a coding wizard
by Lennart Augustsson 07 Apr '11

07 Apr '11

Howdy, y'all! I've written a small program that takes a (Haskell) type and gives you back a function of that type if one exists. It's kind of fun, so I thought I'd share it. It's probably best explained with a sample session. calvin% djinn Welcome to Djinn version 2005-12-11. Type :h to get help. # Djinn is interactive if not given any arguments. # Let's see if it can find the identity function. Djinn> f ? a->a f :: a -> a f x1 = x1 # Yes, that was easy. Let's try some tuple munging. Djinn> sel ? ((a,b),(c,d)) -> (b,c) sel :: ((a, b), (c, d)) -> (b, c) sel ((_, v5), (v6, _)) = (v5, v6) # We can ask for the impossible, but then we get what we # deserve. Djinn> cast ? a->b -- cast cannot be realized. # OK, let's be bold and try some functions that are tricky to write: # return, bind, and callCC in the continuation monad Djinn> type C a = (a -> r) -> r Djinn> returnC ? a -> C a returnC :: a -> C a returnC x1 x2 = x2 x1 Djinn> bindC ? C a -> (a -> C b) -> C b bindC :: C a -> (a -> C b) -> C b bindC x1 x2 x3 = x1 (\ c15 -> x2 c15 (\ c17 -> x3 c17)) Djinn> callCC ? ((a -> C b) -> C a) -> C a callCC :: ((a -> C b) -> C a) -> C a callCC x1 x2 = x1 (\ c15 _ -> x2 c15) (\ c11 -> x2 c11) # Well, poor Djinn has a sweaty brow after deducing the code # for callCC so we had better quit. Djinn> :q Bye. To play with Djinn do a darcs get http://darcs.augustsson.net/Darcs/Djinn or get http://darcs.augustsson.net/Darcs/Djinn/Djinn.tar.gz Then just type make. (You need a Haskell 98 implementation and some libraries.) And then start djinn. For the curious, Djinn uses a decision procedure for intuitionistic propositional calculus due to Roy Dyckhoff. It's a variation of Gentzen's LJ system. This means that (in theory) Djinn will always find a function if one exists, and if one doesn't exist Djinn will terminate telling you so. This is the very first version, so expect bugs. :) Share and enjoy. -- Lennart

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Haskell-mode 2.0
by Stefan Monnier 02 Feb '09

02 Feb '09

I have recently taken over maintainership of Haskell-mode, and after making a bunch of changes, I figured it would be a good idea to make a new release. You can find this new release at: http://www-perso.iro.umontreal.ca/~monnier/elisp/ If you think it should also be found at http://www.haskell.org/haskell-mode/, then please tell John Peterson to get back to me (my email to him seem to go straight to the bitbucket. John?). This release has several changes that have all been only lightly tested, especially w.r.t compatibility with various Emacsen. See appended the NEWS file that describes some of the notewirthy changes. Stefan Changes since 1.45: * keybindings C-c <char> have been replaced by C-c C-<char> so as not to collide with minor modes. * The following modules are now automatically activated without having to add anything to haskell-mode-hook: haskell-font-lock (just turn on global-font-lock-mode). haskell-decl-scan (just bind `imenu' to some key). * In recent Emacsen, haskell-doc hooks into eldoc-mode. * haskell-hugs and haskell-ghci are superceded by inf-haskell. * Indentation rules have been improved when using layout inside parens/braces. * Symbols like -> and \ can be displayed as actual arrows and lambdas. See haskell-font-lock-symbols. * Tweaks to the font-lock settings. Among other things paren-matching with things like \(x,y) should work correctly now. * New maintainer <monnier(a)gnu.org>.

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ANNOUNCE: cabal-install 0.5
by Duncan Coutts 05 Dec '08

05 Dec '08

cabal-install 0.5 ================= cabal-install version 0.5 is out: http://haskell.org/cabal/download.html or get it from hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/cabal-install If you are already using a cabal-install pre-release then you can just: $ cabal update $ cabal install cabal-install New features in cabal-install ============================= Command line improvements ------------------------- The most immediately noticeable thing is that the command line interface now has all the commands that runhaskell Setup.hs has. Of course it still has the features to download and install packages from hackage. It also gained an upload command. So it now provides a command line interface to the whole Cabal/Hackage system. There’s no need to use runhaskell Setup.hs ever again. There is also bash command line completion support included which I find is a great time saver. Installing and upgrading ------------------------ The next big thing is that it includes a new package dependency resolution system that finds correct and sensible solutions more of the time and has better default behaviour. The new behaviour should be similar to other package managers that people are used to. For example, suppose you’ve got xmonad-0.5 installed and version 0.7 is the latest on hackage, then $ cabal install xmonad will install xmonad-0.7. The older version, xmonad-0.5, will remain installed. The behaviour of install is to upgrade as little as possible to satisfy your request, but sometimes you want to upgrade all the dependencies too. Supposing now that we have xmonad-0.7 installed, but we’re still using X11-1.4.1 and the latest version on hackage is X11-1.4.2, then $ cabal upgrade xmonad will install X11-1.4.2 and *re-install* xmonad-0.7, this time built against the newer X11-1.4.2. So in general, the install command will install the latest version of things but will try and use any existing installed versions of dependencies while the upgrade command will also try to use the latest versions of all dependencies. As a special case, cabal upgrade on its own will try to upgrade all the packages that you have installed. For both command there is a --dry-run flag so you can see what would be installed without actually doing it. Hugs ---- Yes, it even works with hugs. That is, cabal-install built by ghc can manage the installation of packages for hugs. In principle cabal-install should be able to be run by hugs but currently the zlib binding is using a function that hugs does not support. Note that for hugs, Cabal does not know what packages are already installed because there is no equivalent of the package database that ghc has. So that means cabal-install cannot do very sensible installation planning. It should work ok so long as all the dependencies are already installed. Windows ------- Yes, it even works on Windows. The one caveat is that cabal-install cannot currently upgrade itself because Windows makes it hard for a process to overwrite its own executable file. It needs more complex trickery with the Win32 API. In the meantime the workaround is to rename the cabal.exe file first eg to cabal-foo.exe, then run cabal-foo install cabal-install. Build reporting --------------- One feature that made it into this release is build reporting. cabal-install keeps logs of all packages that you install (at least packages from hackage, not local ones). It records a bit of information about each package, in particular whether the outcome was successful or not. You can see these build reports in ~/.cabal/packages/$server/build-reports.log. For example, there is one from my machine for xmonad: package: xmonad-0.7 os: linux arch: x86_64 compiler: ghc-6.8.2 client: cabal-install-0.5.1 flags: -testing small_base dependencies: X11-1.4.2 base-3.0.1.0 containers-0.1.0.1 directory-1.0.0.0 mtl-1.1.0.0 process-1.0.0.0 unix-2.3.0.0 install-outcome: InstallOk docs-outcome: NotTried tests-outcome: NotTried The plan in the longer term is to let people upload these build reports to hackage so we can get a wider range of testing data about the packages on hackage. Duncan

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The real Monad Transformer
by Henning Thielemann 13 Nov '08

13 Nov '08

It was argued that people avoid Haskell because of terms from Category theory like 'Monad'. This problem can now be solved by a wrapper which presents all the WWW without monads! Start e.g. at http://saxophone.jpberlin.de/MonadTransformer?source=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ehas… Of course the tool is written in Haskell, that is, Haskell helps solving problems which only exist because of Haskell. Bug reports and feature requests can be tracked at https://sourceforge.net/projects/parallelweb

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ANNOUNCE: lhs2tex-1.14
by Andres Loeh 07 Nov '08

07 Nov '08

lhs2TeX version 1.14 ==================== We are pleased to announce a new release of lhs2TeX, a preprocessor to generate LaTeX code from literate Haskell sources. lhs2TeX includes the following features: * Highly customized output. * Liberal parser -- no restriction to Haskell 98. * Generate multiple versions of a program or document from a single source. * Active documents: call Haskell to generate parts of the document (useful for papers on Haskell). * A manual explaining all the important aspects of lhs2TeX. Changes (w.r.t. lhs2TeX 1.13) ----------------------------- * Compatible with cabal-1.6; traditional configure/make installation should still work. * Unicode support. * Support for Agda's lexing rules (via --agda flag). * Minor bugfixes. Requirements and Download ------------------------- A source distribution is available from http://people.cs.uu.nl/andres/lhs2tex/ and, of course, via Hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/lhs2tex Should work on all major platforms, but has mainly been tested on Linux. Binaries will be made available on request. You need a recent version of GHC (6.8.{2,3} are tested, older versions might work) to build lhs2TeX, and, of course, you need a TeX distribution to make use of lhs2TeX's output. The program includes a configuration that is suitable for use with LaTeX. In theory, there should be no problem to generate code for other TeX flavors, such as plainTeX or ConTeXt. Happy lhs2TeXing, Andres Loeh and Ralf Hinze -- Andres Loeh, Universiteit Utrecht mailto:andres@cs.uu.nl mailto:mail@andres-loeh.de http://www.andres-loeh.de

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Publication of InputYourData.com + Project Announcement
by Enzo Haussecker 02 Nov '08

02 Nov '08

I would like to announce the publication of InputYourData.com (beta) − the online resource tool for financial, mathematical and scientific calculations. All web applications found at http://inputyourdata.com/ are written solely in Haskell and based on the Network.CGI framework. This website began as an experiment to familiarize myself with the monadic features of Haskell and their use in web programming. Namely, the mapping and manipulation of user inputs as typed objects. Through these experiments I found that Haskell allows for an efficient system where a variety of operations can be preformed while minimizing as many resources (such as time and memory space) as possible. I am now interested in developing a similar type of website, except wiki style − where all web applications are created by the user. Essentially, I am designing a web application where users can symbolically declare the arguments of a function and that function's call based on arbitrary variables. For example, say a user would like to create a web application to compute the roots of a second degree polynomial. He/she would simply declare the arguments to her function − three complex numbers a b and c, and the call of that function − (-b ± sqrt (b^2 - 4*a*c))/(2*a). The product of that users inputs will render a web application that looks similar to http://inputyourdata.com/cgi-bin/quadratic.cgi (all text is to be updated by the user as well). As one could imagine, other, more complex functions involving vectors, matrices, stock prices, and other arguments can also be defined in terms of arbitrary variables and declared as an inputs to my wiki-style web application. If you are intrigued by this project and you have substantial experience in designing Haskell-based web applications, please send me your resume and a brief summery of why you are interested. Regards, Enzo Haussecker ehaussecker(a)gmail.com

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ANNOUNCE: multirec-0.1
by Andres Loeh 31 Oct '08

31 Oct '08

multirec: Generic programming with systems of recursive datatypes ================================================================= Many generic programs require information about the recursive positions of a datatype. Examples include the generic fold, generic rewriting or the Zipper data structure. Several generic programming systems allow to write such functions by viewing datatypes as fixed points of a pattern functor. Traditionally, this view has been limited to so-called regular datatypes such as lists and binary trees. In particular, systems of mutually recursive datatypes have been excluded. With the multirec library, we provide a mechanism to talk about fixed points of systems of datatypes that may be mutually recursive. On top of this representations, generic functions such as the fold or the Zipper can then be defined. We expect that the library will be especially interesting for compiler writers, because ASTs are typically systems of mutually recursive datatypes, and with multirec it becomes easy to write generic functions on ASTs. The library is based on ideas described in the paper: Alexey Rodriguez, Stefan Holdermans, Andres Löh, Johan Jeuring Generic programming with fixed points for mutually recursive datatypes Technical Report, Universiteit Utrecht http://www.cs.uu.nl/research/techreps/repo/CS-2008/2008-019.pdf Features -------- * Generalizes the fixed point view from single, regular datatypes to systems of recursive datatypes. * Includes detailed examples: generic fold and generic compos, the latter in the style of Björn Bringert, Arne Ranta A pattern for almost compositional functions ICFP 2006 The Zipper and generic rewriting for systems of datatypes will be released soon as separate libraries that build on multirec. * The generic compos functions do not require the user to modify their existing systems of datatypes. * In its current form, this library does not support nested datatypes. Requirements ------------ * GHC 6.8.3 or later * Cabal 1.2.1 or later Download -------- With cabal-install: cabal install multirec Get the package: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/multirec Get the source: svn checkout https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/repos/dgp-haskell/multirec/trunk Bugs & Support -------------- Report issues, request features, or just discuss the library with the authors, maintainers, and other interested persons at: http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/generics -- Andres Loeh, Universiteit Utrecht mailto:andres@cs.uu.nl mailto:mail@andres-loeh.de http://www.andres-loeh.de

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LAST CALL: Haskell Communities and Activities Report
by Janis Voigtlaender 30 Oct '08

30 Oct '08

Dear Haskellers, It is not yet too late to contribute to the 15th edition of the HC&A Report. In fact, I will wait for a few more days. If you haven't already, please write an entry for your new project or update your old entry. Please mail your entries to hcar(a)haskell.org in plain text or LaTeX format. More information can be found in the original Call for Contributions at http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2008-October/020651.html I look forward to receiving your contributions. Thanks a lot, Janis (current editor) -- Dr. Janis Voigtlaender http://wwwtcs.inf.tu-dresden.de/~voigt/ mailto:voigt@tcs.inf.tu-dresden.de

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Making 'Super Nario Bros.' in Haskell‏
by Korcan Hussein 29 Oct '08

29 Oct '08

Hi I haven't seen this posted any where so I'm sorry in advance if this has been mentioned already but I came across this recent video on youtube: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gVLFGQGRsDw it's a mario clone written in haskell with a link to source code repository (http://svn.coderepos.org/share/lang/haskell/nario/) I thought that it maybe useful to some people. Trustworthiness:Vendor reliability:Privacy:Child safety: _________________________________________________________________ Discover Bird's Eye View now with Multimap from Live Search http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/111354026/direct/01/

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Announce: Chart-0.9
by Tim Docker 29 Oct '08

29 Oct '08

Chart-0.9 is now available via hackage and a darcs repository. This is a library for drawing 2D charts. It relies upon the haskell cairo binding that is part of gtk2hs, and hence supports several backend output formats (png, pdf, ps, etc). Further information is available here: http://dockerz.net/software/chart.html Also, there is now a mailing list for discussions about the library: http://groups.google.com/group/haskell-charts Tim

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