July 2008 - Haskell - Haskell.org

ANN: Hipmunk 0.1 and HipmunkPlayground 0.1
by Felipe Lessa 27 Jul '08

27 Jul '08

Hello! =) I'm pleased to announce the availability of Hipmunk, containing bindings for the Chipmunk 2D physics engine, and Hipmunk Playground, where you may see some of Hipmunk's features in action. The bindings are low-level but try to hide most of the nasty details of the C code. It was tested on two Linux distros (with GHC 6.8.3) and Windows (GHC 6.8.1). You may get Cabal packages for both on Hackage at: - http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Hipmunk - http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/HipmunkPlayground The Chipmunk physics engine home page is at http://wiki.slembcke.net/main/published/Chipmunk . Thanks, -- Felipe.

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ANNOUNCE: Sun Microsystems and Haskell.org joint project on OpenSPARC
by Duncan Coutts 24 Jul '08

24 Jul '08

http://haskell.org/opensparc/ I am very pleased to announce a joint project between Sun Microsystems and the Haskell.org community to exploit the high performance capabilities of Sun's latest multi-core OpenSPARC systems via Haskell! http://opensparc.net/ Sun has donated a powerful 8 core SPARC Enterprise T5120 Server to the Haskell community, and $10,000 to fund a student, to further develop support for high performance Haskell on the SPARC. The aim of the project is to improve the SPARC native code generator in GHC and to demonstrate and improve the results of parallel Haskell benchmarks. The student will work with a mentor from Haskell.org and an adviser from Sun's SPARC compiler team. ** We are now inviting applications from students ** Please forward this announcement to any and all mailing lists where you think interested students might be lurking. Further details for students may be found below, and on the project website. Haskell and Multi-core Systems ------------------------------ The latest generation of multi-core machines pose a number of problems for traditional languages and parallel programming techniques. Haskell, in contrast, supports a wealth of approaches for writing correct parallel programs: traditional explicit threads and locks (forkIO and MVars), pure parallel evaluation strategies (par) and also Software Transactional Memory (STM). GHC has supported lightweight preemptable threads for a long time, and for the last couple of years it has been able to take advantage of machines with multiple CPUs or CPU cores. The GHC runtime has also recently gained a parallel garbage collector. OpenSPARC --------- We think the UltraSPARC T1/T2 architecture is a very interesting platform for Haskell. In particular the way that each core multiplexes many threads as a way of hiding memory latency. Memory latency is a performance bottleneck for Haskell code because the execution model uses a lot of memory indirections. Essentially, when one thread blocks due to a main memory read, the next thread is able to continue. This is in contrast to traditional architectures where the CPU core would stall until the result of the memory read was available. This approach can achieve high utilisation as long as there is enough parallelism available. The Project ----------- GHC is increasingly relying on its native code backend for high performance. Respectable single-threaded performance is a prerequisite for decent parallel performance. The first stage of the project therefore is to implement a new SPARC native code generator, taking advantage of the recent and ongoing infrastructure improvements in the C-- and native layers of the GHC backend. There is some existing support for SPARC in the native code generator but it has not kept up with changes in the GHC backend in the last few years. Once the code generator is working we will want to get a range of single threaded and parallel benchmarks running and look for various opportunities for improvement. There is plenty of ongoing work on the generic parts of the GHC backend and run-time system so the project will focus on SPARC-specific aspects. The UltraSPARC T1/T2 architecture supports very fast thread synchronisation (by taking advantage of the fact that all threads share the same L2 cache). We would like to optimise the synchronisation primitives in the GHC libraries and run-time system to take advantage of this. This should provide the basis for exploring whether the lower synchronisation costs make it advantageous to use more fine-grained parallelism. The Server ---------- The T5120 server has a T2 UltraSPARC processor with 8 cores running at 1.2GHz. Each core multiplexes 8 threads giving 64 hardware threads overall. It comes equipped with 32GB of memory. It also has two 146GB 10k RPM SAS disks. http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5120/ http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T2/ This server is a donation to the whole Haskell community. We will make accounts available on the same basis as the existing community server as soon as is practical. Our friends at Chalmers University of Technology are kindly hosting the server on our behalf. We will encourage people to use the server for building, testing and benchmarking their Haskell software on SPARC, under both Solaris and Linux. Student applications -------------------- This is a challenging and exciting project and will need a high calibre student. Familiarity with Haskell is obviously important as is some experience with code generation for RISC instruction sets. The summer is now upon us so we do not expect students to be able to work 3 months all in one go. We are inviting students to suggest their own schedule when they apply. This may involve blocks of time in the next 9 months or so. It should add up to the equivalent of 3 months full time work. The application process is relatively informal. Students should send their application to: opensparc(a)community.haskell.org The deadline for applications in Friday 5th September 2008. If that deadline likely to be a problem for you then do get in touch. The application should detail skills and experience. Applications will be reviewed by a panel including the mentor, the adviser from Sun and a number of other Haskell.org community members who have helped with reviewing student projects in the past. The review will be partly interactive; students can expect to get questions and feedback from the reviewers. Students are welcome to contact myself or anyone else to help improve the quality of their application or if they have any questions. The $10k student funding will be paid in three phases, at the beginning ($3k), an intermediate point ($3k) and at the end ($4k). The exact timing will depend on the agreed schedule. The intermediate and final payments will be subject to positive reviews from the mentor. Duncan (project coordinator)

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CC 2009: abstracts due Oct 2
by Oege.de.Moor＠comlab.ox.ac.uk 24 Jul '08

24 Jul '08

>>> abstracts - Oct 2, full papers - Oct 9 <<< CC 2009 International Conference on Compiler Construction March 22-29, York, United Kingdom Invited Speaker: Vivek Sarkar (Rice University, US) Part of ETAPS 2009 http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/etaps09/Conf/conf.html#cc CC is a premier forum for presenting research on compilers in the broadest possible sense, including run-time techniques, programming tools, domain-specific languages, novel language constructs and so on. In recent years CC has seen a healthy increase in the number of submissions, in line with its broad outlook; its typical acceptance rate is 20-25%. CC is part of ETAPS, and this year it is held in York (UK), March 22-29 2009. The program committee would particularly welcome submissions from researchers in functional programming on any topic relating to analysis, optimisation and compilation of Haskell programs Abstracts are due on October 2, and the deadline for full paper submission is October 9. Prospective authors are welcome to contact the program chairs, Michael Schwartzbach (mis(a)brics.dk) and Oege de Moor (oege(a)comlab.ox.ac.uk) with any queries they might have.

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Haskell Weekly News: Issue 78 - July 23, 2008
by Brent Yorgey 23 Jul '08

23 Jul '08

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haskell Weekly News http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080723 Issue 78 - July 23, 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to issue 78 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community. Issue 78: In Which Michi and Neil Become Doctors, Sun Donates Some Sweet Loot, and Jules Is Revealed To Be A Helpful Anthropomorphic Robot Community News Congratulations are in order this week to two members of the community who have completed PhDs. Neil Mitchell (ndm) passed his PhD viva last week, subject to minor corrections. Mikael Johansson (Syzygy-) [2]has also completed his PhD and will soon be starting a postdoc at Stanford with the topology in computer science working group. Congratulations, Drs. Mitchell and Johansson! Announcements rosezipper. Eric Kow (kowey) [3]announced the release of [4]rosezipper, Krasimir Angelov and Iavor S. Diatchki's Data.Tree implementation of zippers. list-extras 0.1.0. wren ng thornton (koninkje) [5]announced the initial release of [6]list-extras, a home for common not-so-common list functions. Sun Microsystems and Haskell.org joint project on OpenSPARC. Duncan Coutts (dcoutts) [7]announced a [8]joint project between Sun Microsystems and the Haskell.org community to exploit the high performance capabilities of Sun's latest multi-core [9]OpenSPARC systems via Haskell! Sun has donated a powerful 8 core SPARC Enterprise T5120 Server to the Haskell community, and $10,000 to fund a student to further develop support for high performance Haskell on the SPARC. The student will work with a mentor from Haskell.org and an adviser from Sun's SPARC compiler team. If you're a student and this sounds interesting to you, send in those applications!! Hayoo! beta 0.2. Timo B. [10]announced the second beta release of [11]Hayoo!, a Haskell API search engine providing advanced features like suggestions, find-as-you-type, fuzzy queries and much more. The major change in this release is the inclusion of all packages available on Hackage in the index. Haskell-beginners mailing list. Benjamin L. Russell [12]announced the creation of the [13]Haskell-Beginners Mailing List, beginners at haskell.org, devoted to discussion of primarily beginner-level topics related to Haskell. It's already off to a great start, so if you're a Haskell beginner, or someone interested in answering beginner questions, please subscribe! Haskeline 0.2. Judah Jacobson [14]announced the initial (alpha-ish) release of [15]Haskeline, a library for line input in command-line programs. It is similar in purpose to editline or readline, but is written in Haskell and thus (hopefully) more easily used in other Haskell programs. Google Summer of Code Progress updates from participants in the 2008 [16]Google Summer of Code. Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. [17]This week, he ran QuickCheck on his test suite for the first time, and found a large number of failing tests! He's got his work cut out for him straightening those out over the next few days. DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a [18]physics engine using [19]Data Parallel Haskell. [20]This week, he implemented full handling of rigid body collisions, including angular velocity. Next he plans to explore various ways to make the engine faster, including broad-phase collision detection. GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. [21]This week, he revealed his "mystery project": an HTML pretty-printer for GHC core! [22]Here is a sample. Now his focus turns to tidying things up and solidifying documentation in preparation for getting his patches merged into GHC HEAD. Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on [23]Hoogle 4. [24]This week, he fleshed out the final part of type search, including support for instances and alpha renaming of variables. Unfortunately, it uses too much memory to be feasibly run on the base libraries! Neil has some ideas on how to fix this, however, which he plans to tackle next week. Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is [25]working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. He has finally completed a working implementation for analysing declarations and definitions, and [26]presents a working example of the library's use. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a [27]make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on [28]improvements to the GHC API. Libraries Proposals and extensions to the [29]standard libraries. generalize mapAccumL/R. Ross Paterson [30]proposed adding generalized versions of mapAccumL and mapAccumR to Data.Traversable. signal-handling API. Simon Marlow [31]proposed a [32]new signal-handling API. Discussion Point-free style in guards. L29Ah [33]asked a question about using a points-free style in guard expressions, leading to a number of clever suggestions involving custom combinators. Optimizing sequence. Gracjan Polak started a [34]discussion on the strictness properties of the sequence function, and its implications for optimization. It sounds as though adding an alternate strict version of sequence to the libraries could be a good idea. Blog noise [35]Haskell news from the [36]blogosphere. * Eric Kow (kowey): [37]rose zipper on hackage. Eric has uploaded an implementation of a zipper for Data.Tree to hackage. * Jamie Brandon: [38]QuickCheck strikes again. An update on Jamie's Google Summer of Code project. Lots of failing QuickCheck tests mean Jamie has his work cut out for him. * >>> Ayumilove: [39]Haskell Programming Tutorial Part 1. A video introduction to Haskell? * Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach): [40]Status report: week 7-8. An update on Roman's Google Summer of Code project. * Conal Elliott (conal): [41]Designing for the future. * Benedikt Huber (visq): [42]Language.C: Analysing Definitions. An update on Benedikt's Google Summer of Code project. * Max Bolingbroke: [43]Compiler Plugins For GHC: Week Six. An update on Max's Google Summer of Code project. * Arnar Birgisson (Arnar): [44]Playing with Haskell's lazy lists. Arnar implements Eric Rowland's [45]simple prime-generating recurrence using lazy lists in Haskell. * Neil Mitchell (ndm): [46]GSoC Hoogle: Week 8. An update on Neil's Google Summer of Code project. * Matthew Sackman: [47]What is the point?. Matthew had his submission rejected from the Haskell Symposium, and isn't happy about it. * Tupil: [48]Stemming with Haskell reloaded. An updated, more functional/Haskellish interface to the stemmer library. * Luke Palmer (luqui): [49]Semantic Design. Luke's reflections on a design approach learned from Conal Elliott. * Muad`Dib (vixey): [50]Rascal - Mini-haskell like language. * Jeremy Shaw: [51]HTML Templating in HAppS using HSP. Jeremy writes a very cool introduction/tutorial to using HSP (Haskell Server Pages) with HAppS. * >>> Duane Johnson: [52]Lazy Evaluation at Work. Duane likes the idea of lazy file I/O. * >>> Duane Johnson: [53]A Glimmer of Monadic Hope. Duane figures out do-notation. * >>> Duane Johnson: [54]Using 'foldr' in Haskell. Duane figures out how to define (++) and concat in terms of foldr. * Mikael Johansson (Syzygy-): [55]Dr rer nat, Magna cum laude. * >>> Holden Karau: [56]Integrating your HUnit (or other) tests into your cabal package. * Real-World Haskell: [57]Beta availability hiccups. * >>> Antoine Hersen: [58]ICFP 2008 Postmortem. * Edward Kmett (edwardk): [59]A Sort of Difference. Edward uses an analysis of quicksort in Haskell as a jumping-off point for an introduction to difference lists. * Ralf Lammel: [60]The Expression Lemma -- Explained. Ralf explains the relationship between OOP and FP. * >>> Greg McClure: [61]Learning languages through problem-solving. Greg extols the virtues of [62]Project Euler for learning new languages, and exhibits a solution to the first problem in Haskell, Erlang, and Python. Quotes of the Week * kryptiskt: my point is that our brain isn't some logic machine, it's a jury-rigged contraption to help us get food, friends and sex. It's the Perl of intelligences. * Fallacy: peyton `simon` jones * Quadrescence: [on #haskell] Well, the nice population here attracts people. Unlike other pla_C_es. How'd those underscores get there? * mauke: hmm, regexes get even more cryptic after z-encoding: ZLz3fUZCZLz3fUzlznzrwZRZLz3fUzezrwZRzbZLz3fUzlzezrwZRZLz3fUznzrwZRZR * BMeph: Haskell: Where even the newest newcomer acts monadically: join :: ask (ask something) -> ask something * Quadrescence: quicksilver: You must be an anthropomorphic robot or something. About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [63]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [64]the Haskell Sequence and [65]Planet Haskell. [66]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [67]haskell.org. Headlines are available as [68]PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on [69]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get [70]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . References 1. http://haskell.org/ 2. http://blog.mikael.johanssons.org/archive/2008/07/dr-rer-nat-magna-cum-laud… 3. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/07/rose-zipper-on-hackage.html 4. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/rosezipper 5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42485 6. http://code.haskell.org/~wren/ 7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16351 8. http://haskell.org/opensparc/ 9. http://opensparc.net/ 10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16349 11. http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/hayoo 12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16345 13. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners 14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16343 15. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/haskeline 16. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/SoC2008 17. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/quickcheck-strikes-again.html 18. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hpysics 19. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell 20. http://physics-dph.blogspot.com/2008/07/status-report-week-7-8.html 21. http://blog.omega-prime.co.uk/2008/07/21/compiler-plugins-for-ghc-week-six/ 22. http://www.omega-prime.co.uk/files/GHC-Core-HTML.html 23. http://code.haskell.org/hoogle/ 24. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-8.html 25. http://www.sivity.net/projects/language.c/wiki/ 26. http://hsbene.blogspot.com/2008/07/languagec-analysing-definitions.html 27. http://code.haskell.org/~Saizan/cabal 28. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GhcApiStatus 29. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Library_submissions 30. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9649 31. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9599 32. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2451 33. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42475 34. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42453 35. http://planet.haskell.org/ 36. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles 37. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/07/rose-zipper-on-hackage.html 38. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/quickcheck-strikes-again.html 39. http://www.5min.com/Video/Ayumilove-Haskell-Programming-Tutorial-Part-1-311… 40. http://physics-dph.blogspot.com/2008/07/status-report-week-7-8.html 41. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/conal/~3/342784118/ 42. http://hsbene.blogspot.com/2008/07/languagec-analysing-definitions.html 43. http://blog.omega-prime.co.uk/2008/07/21/compiler-plugins-for-ghc-week-six/ 44. http://www.hvergi.net/2008/07/playing-with-haskells-lazy-lists/ 45. http://recursed.blogspot.com/2008/07/rutgers-graduate-student-finds-new.html 46. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-8.html 47. http://www.wellquite.org/what_is_the_point.html 48. http://blog.tupil.com/stemming-with-haskell-reloaded/ 49. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/07/18/semantic-design/ 50. http://muaddibspace.blogspot.com/2008/07/rascal-mini-haskell-like-language.… 51. http://nhlab.blogspot.com/2008/07/html-templating-in-happs-using-hsp.html 52. http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/07/18/lazy-evaluation-at-work/ 53. http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/07/17/a-glimmer-of-monadic-hope/ 54. http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/07/17/using-foldr-in-haskell/ 55. http://blog.mikael.johanssons.org/archive/2008/07/dr-rer-nat-magna-cum-laud… 56. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/holdenkarau/iYtm/~3/337908379/integrating-yo… 57. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/07/16/beta-availability-hiccups/ 58. http://endymion2021.livejournal.com/17117.html 59. http://comonad.com/reader/2008/a-sort-of-difference/ 60. http://blogs.msdn.com/ralflammel/archive/2008/07/16/the-expression-lemma-ex… 61. http://www.codechops.com/?p=15 62. http://www.projecteuler.net/ 63. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 64. http://sequence.complete.org/ 65. http://planet.haskell.org/ 66. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed 67. http://haskell.org/ 68. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/archives/20080723.pdf 69. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN 70. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/

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Commercial Users of Functional Programming Workshop Call for Participation
by Andy Adams-Moran 22 Jul '08

22 Jul '08

Commercial Users of Functional Programming Workshop (CUFP) 2008 Functional Programming As a Means, Not an End Call for Participation Sponsored by SIGPLAN Co-located with ICFP 2008 __________________________________________________________________ 26 September 2008 Victoria, Canada Registration opens in late July through http://www.icfpconference.org/icfp2008/ __________________________________________________________________ Functional languages have been under academic development for over 25 years, and remain fertile ground for programming language research. Recently, however, developers in industrial, governmental, and open source projects have begun to use functional programming successfully in practical applications. In these settings, functional programming has often provided dramatic leverage, including whole new ways of thinking about the original problem. The goal of the CUFP workshop is to act as a voice for these users of functional programming. The workshop supports the increasing viability of functional programming in the commercial, governmental, and open-source space by providing a forum for professionals to share their experiences and ideas, whether those ideas are related to business, management, or engineering. The workshop is also designed to enable the formation and reinforcement of relationships that further the commercial use of functional programming. Providing user feedback to language designers and implementors is not a primary goal of the workshop, though it will be welcome if it occurs. Program CUFP 2008 will last a full day and feature a discussion session and the following presentations: Don Syme (Microsoft) Invited Presentation: Why Microsoft is Investing in Functional Programming David Balaban (Amgen) Minimizing the Immune Response to Functional Programming at Amgen Francesco Cesarini (Erlang Training and Consulting) The Mobile Messaging Gateway, from Idea to Prototype to Launch in 12 months Jake Donham (Skydeck) From OCaml to Javascript at Skydeck Nick Gerakines (Yahoo) Developing Erlang at Yahoo Tom Hawkins (Eaton Corporation) Controlling Hybrid Vehicles with Haskell Bob Ippolito (Mochimedia) Ad Serving with Erlang Anil Madhavapeddy (Citrix) Xen and the art of OCaml Howard Mansell (Credit Suisse) Quantitative Finance in F# Jeff Polakow (Deutsche Bank) Is Haskell ready for everyday computing? David Pollak (Lift web framework) Buy a Feature: an adventure in immutability and Actors Gregory Wright (Antiope) Functions to Junctions: Ultra Low Power Chip Design With Some Help From Haskell There will be no published proceedings, as the meeting is intended to be more a discussion forum than a technical interchange. See http://cufp.galois.com for more information, including presentation abstracts and the most recent schedule information. Program Committee * Lennart Augustsson <lennart(dot)augustsson(at)gmail(dot)com> * Matthias Blume <blume(at)tti-c(dot)org> * Adam Granicz <granicz(dot)adam(at)intellifactory(dot)com> * Jim Grundy(co-chair)<jim(dot)d(dot)grundy(at)intel(dot)com> * Andy Martin <akmartin(at)us(dot)ibm(dot)com> * Yaron Minsky <yminsky(at)janestcapital(dot)com> * Simon Peyton Jones(co-chair)<simonpj(at)microsoft(dot)com> * Ulf Wiger <ulf(dot)wiger(at)ericsson(dot)com> This will be the fifth CUFP; see CUFP 2004 CUFP 2005, CUFP 2006, and CUFP 2007 for information about the earlier meetings, including reports from attendees and video of the most recent talks. -- Andy Adams-Moran Phone: 503.626.6616, x113 Galois Fax: 503.214.8120 421 SW 6th Ave, Suite #300 http://www.galois.com Portland, OR 97204 adams-moran(a)galois.com

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NW Functional Programming Interest Group
by Greg Meredith 19 Jul '08

19 Jul '08

All, Apologies for multiple listings. A small cadre of us are organizing a Northwest Functional Programming Interest Group (hey... NWFPIG, that's kinda funny). Our first official meeting is at the The Seattle Public Library 1000 - 4th Ave. Seattle, WA 98104 from 17:00 - 18:00 on February 20th. On the first meeting's agenda we'll be - giving people who are interested in or actively using FP for work or play a chance to meet - seeking to build up a pipeline of presentations and guest speakers - trying to keep organizational mishigosh to a minimum Hope to see you there. Monadically yours, --greg -- L.G. Meredith Managing Partner Biosimilarity LLC 806 55th St NE Seattle, WA 98105 +1 206.650.3740 http://biosimilarity.blogspot.com

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ANN: Haskeline 0.2
by Judah Jacobson 18 Jul '08

18 Jul '08

Hi all, This is to announce the initial (alpha-ish) release of Haskeline, a library for line input in command-line programs. It is similar in purpose to editline or readline, but is written in Haskell and thus (hopefully) more easily used in other Haskell programs. === Links === Hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/haskeline Development repo: darcs get http://code.haskell.org/haskeline Bug tracking: http://trac.haskell.org/haskeline === Features === - Runs on POSIX-compatible systems, including non-ANSI terminals. - Runs on the native Windows APIs using MinGW (Cygwin support is TODO). - Supports Unicode cross-platform (POSIX is only UTF-8, for now). - Provides a rich user interface, supporting both Emacs and Vi edit modes and customizable in a ~/.haskeline file. - Implements history recall and incremental search. - Allows custom tab completion functions which run in an arbitrary monad. -Judah

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ANN: The Haskell-Beginners Mailing List (beginners@haskell.org)
by Benjamin L.Russell 17 Jul '08

17 Jul '08

On behalf of the many, many contributors to the thread "on starting Haskell-Edu, a new education-related Haskell-related mailing list," I am pleased to announce that The Haskell-Beginners Mailing List Discussion of primarily beginner-level topics related to Haskell beginners(a)haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners has been launched, and is awaiting contributions from readers. This mailing list is for primarily beginner-level discussion about topics related to Haskell. Feel free to ask beginner-level questions, or to discuss beginner-level topics, related to Haskell here. Please don't cross-post to both Haskell and Haskell-Beginners. A brief list of navigational links follows: To subscribe, visit: Beginners Info Page http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners To browse, visit: The Beginners Archives http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/beginners/ To use via Gmane, visit: Gmane -- Mail To News And Back Again -- Information about gmane.comp.lang.haskell.beginners http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.beginners I hope that Haskell-Beginners will be of service to you, and that your time and effort on this list will prove meaningful. May the Lambda-Force of Haskell be with you! Many thanks go to all the people who have contributed to the creation of this mailing list, both directly, by sending in comments and suggestions, and indirectly, by asking beginner questions and discussing beginner topics on Haskell-Cafe. I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I will. -- Benjamin L. Russell

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WLPE'08 - First call for Papers
by WLPE-08 17 Jul '08

17 Jul '08

WLPE'08 -- Call for Papers The 18th Workshop on Logic-based methods in Programming Environments http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/Conferences/WLPE08/ December 9th-13th 2008, Udine, Italy (Satellite Workshop of ICLP 2008) The 18th Workshop on Logic-based methods in Programming Environments will take place in Udine (Italy), as a satellite workshop of ICLP 2008, the 24th International Conference on Logic Programming. This workshop will continue the series of successful international workshops on logic programming environments held in Ohio, USA (1989), Eilat, Israel (1990), Paris, France (1991), Washington D.C., USA (1992), Vancouver, Canada (1993), Santa Margherita Ligure, Italy (1994), Portland, USA (1995), Leuven, Belgium (1997), Las Cruces, USA (1999), Paphos, Cyprus (2001), Copenhagen, Denmark (2002), Mumbai, India (2003), Saint Malo, France (2004), Sitges (Barcelona), Spain (2005), Seattle, USA (2006) and Porto, Portugal (2007). More information about the series of WLPE workshops can be found at http://www.cs.usask.ca/projects/envlop/WLPE/ The workshop aims at providing an informal meeting for researchers working on logic-based methods and tools which support program development and analysis. This year, we plan to continue and consolidate the shift in focus from environmental tools for logic programming to logic-based environmental tools for programming in general, so that this workshop can be possibly interesting for a wider scientific community. In addition to papers describing more conceptual and theoretical work, the call for papers will solicit papers describing the implementation of, and the experience with, such tools. Areas particularly relevant to the workshop include (but are not limited to): - static and dynamic analysis - debugging and testing - program verification and validation - code generation from specifications - termination and non-termination analysis - reasoning on occurs-check freeness and determinacy - profiling and performance analysis - type- and mode analysis - module systems - optimization tools Authors who are interested in taking part in the workshop, but are unsure if their work falls within its scope, are invited to contact the organizers and will be given suitable advice. Workshop Organizers ------------------- Puri Arenas Facultad de Informatica Universidad Complutense de Madrid 28040-Madrid, Spain Email: puri(a)sip.ucm.es Phone: +34 91 394 76 33 Fax: +34 91 336 50 18 http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/puri Damiano Zanardini Facultad de Informatica Universidad PolitÃÂ©cnica de Madrid 28660-Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain Email: damiano(a)clip.dia.fi.upm.es Phone: +34 91 336 74 48 Fax: +34 91 394 75 29 http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/damiano Program Committee ----------------- - Puri Arenas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (ws co-chair) - Michael Codish, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev - Roberta Gori, Universita di Pisa - Arnaud Gotlieb, IRISA/CNRS UMR 6074 - Patricia Hill, University of Leeds - Jacob Howe, City University, London - Sabina Rossi, Universita Ca' Foscari di Venezia - Tom Schrijvers, K.U.Leuven - Alexander Serebrenik, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven - Wim Vanhoof, University of Namur - German Vidal, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia - Damiano Zanardini, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid,(ws co-chair) Important Dates --------------- Submission: September 15th, 2008 (23:59:59 Samoa time (GMT -11)) Notification: October 8th, 2008 Camera-ready: October 26th, 2008 Workshop: TBA (probably Dec 9th or Dec 13th, half-day) Submission ---------- Papers should be submitted to http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wlpe2008 The length of papers can range from 2 to 15 pages in LNCS style. Informal proceedings will be distributed at the workshop. After the workshop, proceedings will be available on-line in the Computing Research Repository (CoRR). In addition to papers describing conceptual and theoretical work, papers describing the implementation of and the experience with tools are welcome.

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Haskell Weekly News: Issue 77 - July 16, 2008
by Brent Yorgey 16 Jul '08

16 Jul '08

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haskell Weekly News http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080716 Issue 77 - July 16, 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to issue 77 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community. Announcements Takusen 0.8.3. Alistair Bayley [2]announced the release of [3]Takusen 0.8.3, with ODBC support, more Cabal improvements, bug fixes, and some basic result-set validation. Launching Haskell Group in Vancouver, Canada. Jon Strait [4]announced that a [5]Haskell Programmers Group has been created in Vancouver; the first meeting is scheduled for next Monday, July 21st. Feel free to join the Google Groups list to be notified of future events, or just show up to a meeting to bounce ideas and questions off of other Haskell programmers. Sphinx full-text searching client on Hackage. Chris Eidhof [6]announced work on a [7]client for the [8]sphinx full-text search engine. Help hacking on it, testing it or improving documentation is welcome. haskell-src-exts 0.3.5. Niklas Broberg [9]announced that the [10]haskell-src-exts package is now updated to understand the current version of Template Haskell syntax. Bug reports welcome. Prime time for Haskell. Janis Voigtlaender [11]announced that Haskell STM is featured in an [12]article in this month's Communications of the ACM. vector 0.1 (efficient arrays with lots of fusion). Roman Leshchinskiy [13]announced an initial release of the [14]vector library, which will eventually provide fast, Int-indexed arrays with a powerful fusion framework. Galois Tech Talks: Stream Fusion for Haskell Arrays. Don Stewart [15]announced that he was giving this week's Galois Tech Talk, on stream fusion for Haskell arrays. The talk was yesterday, July 15, but hopefully some sort of recording or slides will be made available. protocol-buffers. Chris Kuklewicz [16]announced a very early version of the [17]protocol-buffers package, a Haskell interface to Google's newly released [18]data interchange format. GHC IRC meeting. Simon Marlow [19]announced the (first weekly?) IRC meeting to discuss GHC, a scheduled time when the developers turn up on #ghc, discuss current topics around GHC, and users can chime in with questions, points for discussion, complaints and so on. The first meeting took place on July 16 at 1600 BST (UTC +1)/0800 PDT (UTC-7)/1100 EDT (UTC-4), in the #ghc channel on chat.freenode.net; hopefully this will become a weekly event. Google Summer of Code Progress updates from participants in the 2008 [20]Google Summer of Code. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on [21]improvements to the GHC API. He recently [22]asked for comments on a proposed refactoring to the GHC API, creating a new Ghc monad to capture error handling and single-threaded use of Sessions. GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. [23]This week, he wrote a ton of Haddock documentation for GHC internals. He also added the ability for compiler plugins to generate their own source annotations, to allow plugins to use intermediate results from previous plugins. He's currently working on an exciting, secret feature: tune in next week to find out what it is! Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. Jamie is [24]currently working on, tweaking the [25]api, writing tests and writing reference implementations on sorted and unsorted association lists. Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on [26]Hoogle 4. [27]This week, he worked on type search and database generation. Next week he plans to finish up type search and release and command-line version. Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is [28]working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a [29]physics engine using [30]Data Parallel Haskell. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a [31]make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal. Libraries Proposals and extensions to the [32]standard libraries. adding split to Data.List. Gwern Branwen [33]proposed adding some split-like functions to Data.List. Will they actually get added this time? Will people be able to agree on one of the seventeen possible sets of semantics? Tune in next time... Discussion GHC API: monad and error handling. Thomas Schilling [34]asked for comments on a proposed refactoring to the GHC API, creating a new Ghc monad to capture error handling and single-threaded use of Sessions. Jobs Research positions on Modeling and Analyzing Software Adaptation, University of Koblenz. Ralf Lammel [35]announced two research positions for a postdoc and a PhD student, available initially for 2 years. The successful applicants will work on the research theme of "ADAPT: Modeling and Analyzing Software Adaptation". The objective of [36]ADAPT is to relate, advance, combine, and challenge adaptation methods and associated methods of modeling and analyzing that are used by the communities of software engineering, programming languages, logic-based modeling, multi-agent systems, formal methods, SOA, web systems, and mobile, autonomous systems. Blog noise [37]Haskell news from the [38]blogosphere. * Real-World Haskell: [39]Real World Haskellers at OSCON next week. John Goerzen and Bryan O'Sullivan will be in Portland, Oregon next week for OSCON (along with Don Stewart, who lives in Portland). * Russell O'Connor: [40]ICFP 2008 Post-Mortem. * Brent Yorgey: [41]Call for an ICFP Mars Server. Will someone make a Mars Server where we can all submit our rovers and new maps, watch them compete, improve them, and generally have fun getting some feedback without bugging the organizing committee? Pretty please? * Jamie Brandon: [42]Week 5 progress. An update on Jamie's Google Summer of Code project. * Brent Yorgey: [43]ICFP programming contest reflections. * >>> Chris Bogart: [44]Help with study of functional programmers. Chris is doing a study as part of a research internship at Microsoft, and is seeking people currently working on a real project in a functional language whom he can observe as part of his study. * >>> eigenclass: [45]Quicksort erratum. A time and space analysis of a classic quicksort implementation in Haskell. * Ralf Lammel: [46]Research positions on Modeling and Analyzing Software Adaptation, University of Koblenz. * Max Bolingbroke: [47]Compiler Plugins For GHC: Week Five. An update on Max's Google Summer of Code project. * Luke Plant: [48]Haskell Blog Rewrite - Session 7. Luke documents setting up CentOS in VirtualBox VM in order to compile Haskell code for a server to which he does not have ssh access. Not for the faint of heart. * Chris Eidhof: [49]Stemming with Haskell. A [50]stemming library and [51]Sphinx client for Haskell. * >>> Duane Johnson: [52]Haskell is Popular on IRC. The large amount of community participation and academic brainshare gives Duane a lot of confidence in Haskell. * >>> Mike Harris: [53]ICFP Programming Contest '08. Mike participated in the ICFP programming contest, and might try porting his solution to Haskell. * Luke Palmer: [54]The Curry-Howard isomorphism and the duality of x and ->. * Magnus Therning: [55]Playing with prefixes. Magnus explores different ways to encode units of storage (bytes, kilobytes, kibibytes...) in Haskell. * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [56]MSFP 2008. * Shin-Cheng Mu: [57]Tail-Recursive, Linear-Time Fibonacci. * Neil Mitchell: [58]GSoC Hoogle: Week 7. * FP Lunch: [59]CCC-ness of the category of containers. * JP Moresmau: [60]instance Data Map where -- half done!. JP writes an Data.Generics.Data instance for Data.Map. * >>> Rick Carback: [61]AutoKey in Haskell. Rick is learning Haskell and has implemented a simple AutoKey cipher. * >>> Jeremy Frens: [62]PE Problem #2 in All Languages (Part II). * Luke Palmer: [63]Required Optimization. Annotations for specifying expected compiler optimizations? * London Haskell Users Group: [64]AngloHaskell 2008. * >>> Justus: [65]random programming. Solving a simple programming challenge in Haskell. Quotes of the Week * Japsu: segfault cat is watching you unsafeCoerce * z0MB13: who can say hello to me as a md5 or decipher what kind of technique can be used to remove the password * denq: [upon experiencing a moment of enlightenment] oh! something bing in my brain :) * Pseudonym: Pseudonym needs codependent types - useful when you're doing dysfunctional programming. About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [66]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [67]the Haskell Sequence and [68]Planet Haskell. [69]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [70]haskell.org. Headlines are available as [71]PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on [72]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas 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://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9570 3. http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/Takusen/0.8.3/Takusen-0.8.3.tar… 4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42287 5. http://groups.google.com/group/hugvan 6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42263 7. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/sphinx 8. http://www.sphinxsearch.com/ 9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42233 10. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/haskell-src-exts 11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42227 12. http://research.microsoft.com/~larus/Papers/p80-larus.pdf 13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42207 14. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/vector 15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42196 16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9575 17. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/protocol-buffers 18. http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html 19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/14741 20. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/SoC2008 21. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GhcApiStatus 22. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9589 23. http://blog.omega-prime.co.uk/?p=69 24. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/week-5-progress.html 25. http://code.haskell.org/gmap/api 26. http://code.haskell.org/hoogle/ 27. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-7.html 28. http://www.sivity.net/projects/language.c/wiki/ 29. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hpysics 30. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell 31. http://code.haskell.org/~Saizan/cabal 32. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Library_submissions 33. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9558 34. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9589 35. http://blogs.msdn.com/ralflammel/archive/2008/07/15/research-positions-on-m… 36. http://adapt.uni-koblenz.de/ 37. http://planet.haskell.org/ 38. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles 39. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/07/16/real-world-haskellers-at-os… 40. http://r6.ca/blog/20080716T131235Z.html 41. http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/call-for-an-icfp-mars-server/ 42. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/week-5-progress.html 43. http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/icfp-programming-contest-reflection… 44. http://sambangu.blogspot.com/2008/07/help-with-study-of-functional 45. http://eigenclass.org/hiki/quicksort-erratum 46. http://blogs.msdn.com/ralflammel/archive/2008/07/15/research-positions-on-m… 47. http://blog.omega-prime.co.uk/2008/07/14/compiler-plugins-for-ghc-week-five/ 48. http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog.php?id=1107301689 49. http://blog.tupil.com/stemming-with-haskell/ 50. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/stemmer 51. http://www.sphinxsearch.com/ 52. http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/07/14/haskell-is-popular-on-irc/ 53. http://thingsthatmikethinks.blogspot.com/2008/07/icfp-programming-contest-0… 54. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/07/13/ch-isomorphism-duality/ 55. http://therning.org/magnus/archives/354 56. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/07/msfp-2008.html 57. http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/~scm/2008/tail-recursive-linear-time-fibonacci/ 58. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-7.html 59. http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fplunch/weblog/?p=108 60. http://jpmoresmau.blogspot.com/2008/07/instance-data-map-where-half-done.ht… 61. http://carback.us/rick/blog/?p=24 62. http://jdfrens.blogspot.com/2008/07/pe-problem-2-in-all-languages-part-ii.h… 63. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/07/10/required-optimization/ 64. http://www.londonhug.net/2008/07/10/anglohaskell-2008/ 65. http://hoostus.blogspot.com/2008/07/random-programming.html 66. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 67. http://sequence.complete.org/ 68. http://planet.haskell.org/ 69. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed 70. http://haskell.org/ 71. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/archives/20080716.pdf 72. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN 73. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/

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