- Haskell - Haskell.org

Haskell Weekly News: Issue 108 - March 7, 2009
by Brent Yorgey 07 Mar '09

07 Mar '09

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haskell Weekly News http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20090307 Issue 108 - March 07, 2009 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to issue 108 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community. The ICFP programming contest will be held from 26-29th June! It's not too early to start thinking about putting a team together. Announcements tar 0.3.0.0. Duncan Coutts [2]announceda major new release of the [3]tar package for handling ".tar" archive files. This release has a completely new and much improved API. storable 0.1 -- Storable type class for variable-sized data. Tomáš Janoušek [4]announced the first release of the [5]storable library, which fills the gap between Foreign.Storable and Data.Binary by adding support for marshalling (finite) values of variable-sized data types, like lists or trees, while preserving the performance and memory efficiency one expects from the Storable class. It also provides a (monadic) syntactic sugar that takes care of alignment restrictions by itself and makes instance deriving easy. CFP: Submit a talk proposal to CUFP. Kathleen Fisher [6]requested talk proposals for [7]CUFP. The Industrial Haskell Group. Duncan Coutts [8]announced the creation of the [9]Industrial Haskell Group (IHG). The IHG is an organisation to support the needs of commercial users of the Haskell programming language. Currently, the main activity of the IHG is a collaborative development scheme, in which multiple companies fund work on the Haskell development platform to their mutual benefit. The scheme has started with three partners of the IHG, including Galois and Amgen. pandoc 1.2. John MacFarlane [10]announced the release of [11]pandoc version 1.2. The most significant new feature is support for literate Haskell; you can now use pandoc directly on literate Haskell source files to produce syntax-highlighted HTML output. A Haskell binding for the Augeas API. Jude [12]announced a [13]Haskell FFI binding for the Augeas configuration editing API. Haskell Logo Voting will start soon!. Eelco Lempsink [14]announced that [15]voting for the new Haskell logo will begin on March 16! Everyone subscribed to haskell-cafe will receive a ballot; if you are not subscribed but would like to vote, email Eelco with the subject "haskell logo voting ballot request" and include a short, unique message. Happstack 0.2 Released. Matthew Elder [16]announced the [17]release of [18]Happstack 0.2. Extensible and Modular Generics for the Masses: emgm-0.3. Sean Leather [19]announced the third major release of [20]Extensible and Modular Generics for the Masses (EMGM), a library for generic programming in Haskell using type classes and a sum-of-products view. Deriving is now greatly improved, and there are several new functions, including case, everywhere, and everywhere'. major speed improvement: regex-tdfa reaches 1.0.0. ChrisK proudly [21]announced the version 1.0.0 release of [22]regex-tdfa. This is is not just a bug fix release; it is a serious improvement in the asymptotic running time of the library algorithms. Discussion Definitions of purity and Lazy IO. Oleg began a [23]discussion on lazy IO. Left fold enumerator - a real pearl overlooked?. Günther Schmidt began a [24]discussion of left-fold enumerators and their current status within the community. Jobs Looking for a co-founder for a startup using Haskell. Ed McCaffrey [25]is looking for a co-founder to work on a startup music project in Haskell. Email Ed for more information. Fully-funded doctoral studentships in dependently type programming at Oxford and Strathclyde. Jeremy Gibbons [26]announced two fully-funded doctoral student positions in dependently-typed programming at [27]Oxford and [28]Strathclyde. Blog noise [29]Haskell news from the [30]blogosphere. * Holumbus: [31]First release of Holumbus-MapReduce. * FP Lunch: [32]Breadth first labelling. * Sean Leather: [33]Experiments with EMGM: Emacs org files. * Galois, Inc: [34]Call for Proposals: CUFP 2009. * Matthew Elder: [35]Happstack 0.2 Released. * Yi: [36]Lazy and Incremental Parsing: the paper. * Xmonad: [37]xmonad as a multi-head sliding block puzzle. * Don Stewart (dons): [38]Playing with GHC's parallel runtime. * Bjorn Buckwalter: [39]Extended sessions with the Haskell Curl bindings. * Manuel M T Chakravarty: [40]Installing GtK2Hs on a Mac with the native GTK+ OS X Framework.. * Alex Mason: [41]If you need speed, don't talk to main!. * Luke Palmer: [42]New game: SpaceBattle. * Galois, Inc: [43]Galois Tech Talk: Specializing Generators for High-Performance Monte-Carlo Simulation in Haskell. * Bjorn Buckwalter: [44]Programmer Man. * Conrad Parker: [45]Random code: Pretty printing durations in Haskell. * The GHC Team: [46]New paper: Runtime Support for Multicore Haskell. * ganesh: [47]London Haskell Users Group. * Manuel M T Chakravarty: [48]This is the performance of a dot product of two vectors of 10.... * Sean Leather: [49]Template Haskell 2.3 or Cabal 1.2? EMGM can't have both!. * Tom Schrijvers: [50]Complete and Decidable Type Inference for GADTs. * Galois, Inc: [51]Trustworthy Voting Systems. * Well-Typed.Com: [52]The Industrial Haskell Group. * Sean Leather: [53]Incremental fold, a design pattern. * Darcs: [54]darcs weekly news #19. * FP Lunch: [55]Container eating. About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [56]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [57]the Haskell Sequence and [58]Planet Haskell. [59]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [60]haskell.org. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on [61]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get [62]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . References 1. http://haskell.org/ 2. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-March/056870.html 3. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/tar 4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16934 5. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/storable 6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16904 7. http://cufp.galois.com/2009/call.html 8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16903 9. http://industry.haskell.org/ 10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16899 11. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/pandoc 12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16897 13. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/augeas 14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54201 15. http://community.haskell.org/~eelco/poll.html 16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54144 17. http://blog.happstack.com/2009/03/04/happstack-02-released 18. http://blog.happstack.com/2009/03/04/happstack-02-released 19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54035 20. http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/GenericProgramming/EMGM 21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/53943 22. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/regex%2Dtdfa 23. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16914 24. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/53873 25. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54246 26. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16927 27. http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/news/72-full.html 28. http://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/~conor/phds/ 29. http://planet.haskell.org/ 30. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles 31. http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/blog/?p=17 32. http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fplunch/weblog/?p=205 33. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/splonderzoek/~3/6bxI33NIRMc/experiments-with… 34. http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/03/05/call-for-proposals-cufp-2009/ 35. http://blog.happstack.com/2009/03/04/happstack-02-released/ 36. http://yi-editor.blogspot.com/2009/03/lazy-and-incremental-parsing-paper.ht… 37. http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/xmonad-as-a-multi-head-sliding-block… 38. http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/playing-with-ghcs-parallel-runtime/ 39. http://flygdynamikern.blogspot.com/2009/03/extended-sessions-with-haskell-c… 40. http://justtesting.org/post/83333955 41. http://axman6.homeip.net/blog/2009/03/if-you-need-speed-dont-talk-to-main.h… 42. http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/new-game-spacebattle/ 43. http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/03/03/galois-tech-talk-specializing-generat… 44. http://flygdynamikern.blogspot.com/2009/02/programmer-man.html 45. http://blog.kfish.org/2009/03/random-code-pretty-printing-durations.html 46. http://ghcmutterings.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/new-paper-runtime-support-for… 47. http://www.londonhug.net/2009/03/03/80/ 48. http://justtesting.org/post/83014052 49. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/splonderzoek/~3/WqqB1QrNZ_4/template-haskell… 50. http://tomschrijvers.blogspot.com/2009/03/complete-and-decidable-type-infer… 51. http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/03/02/trustworthy-voting-systems/ 52. http://blog.well-typed.com/2009/03/the-industrial-haskell-group/ 53. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/splonderzoek/~3/tj_MkKqIlkQ/incremental-fold… 54. http://blog.darcs.net/2009/03/darcs-weekly-news-19.html 55. http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fplunch/weblog/?p=201 56. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 57. http://sequence.complete.org/ 58. http://planet.haskell.org/ 59. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed 60. http://haskell.org/ 61. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN 62. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/

1 0

Definitions of purity and Lazy IO
by oleg＠okmij.org 06 Mar '09

06 Mar '09

As Amr Sabry aptly observed more than a decade ago discussions of purity and referential transparency usually lead to confusion and disagreement. His JFP paper provided the needed rigor and argued that Haskell even _with regular file (stream) IO_ is pure. As was shown yesterday, with Lazy IO, Haskell is not pure. Before we discuss definitions, let us note the motivations. Suppose I have a Haskell program. As every single (compiled) Haskell program it has the main function, of the type IO a for some a. It must use IO, at least to print the final result, the observation of the program. Suppose the program contains the expression "e1 + e2" adding two integer expressions. Can I replace this expression with "e2 + e1" and be sure the observations of my program are unaffected? If one says that ``you should assume that every IO operation returns a random result'' then we have no ability to reason about any real Haskell program. We can't be sure of soundness of any compiler optimization. So, Haskell is far worse than C!? With C, Xavier Leroy has managed to create a provably correct optimizing compiler, and mechanically _prove_ the soundness of all optimizations. A C program, just like a Haskell program, must use IO at least to print the final result. We can never hope to build a provably correct compiler for Haskell? We cannot prove observational equivalences of any real Haskell program? Isn't that sad? The formal question is thus: are the following two expressions f1 and f2, of a *pure type* Int->Int->Int f1, f2:: Int -> Int -> Int f1 = \e1 e2 -> case (e1,e2) of (1,_) -> e1 - e2 (_,_) -> e1 - e2 f2 = \e1 e2 -> case (e1,e2) of (_,1) -> e1 - e2 (_,_) -> e1 - e2 equal? Before one invokes an equational theory or says that both these expressions are just integer subtraction, let me clarify the question: are f1 and f2 at least weakly observationally equivalent? That is, for any program context C[] such that C[f1] is well-typed, the program C[f2] must too be well-typed, and if one can observe the result of C[f1] and of C[f2], the two observations must be identical. The observation of a program may (and often does) involve side-effects and IO (more on it below). The message posted yesterday exhibited a context C[] that distinguishes f1 from f2. Thus, in presence of Lazy IO, any equational theory that equates f1 and f2 cannot be sound. I don't think one can design such a context C[] using the regular, eager file IO. Amr Sabry in a paper ``What is a Purely Functional Language?'' J. Functional Programming, 8(1), 1-22, Jan. 1998. http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~sabry/papers/purelyFunctional.ps proposed the definition of purity, see p 2 and Definition 4.7. The definition essentially states that call-by-name, call-by-value and call-by-need evaluation functions must be weakly equivalent. These evaluation functions map programs to observables. The part of evaluation dealing with observing the answers may have side effects! Sec 5.1 rigorously shows that lambda-calculus with global state and destructive mutation may be called pure functional, if effects are regarded as values and the program is written in what we now call a monadic style (whose idea was proposed by Reynolds back in 1981 when studying Idealized Algol). The end of Sec 5.1 remarks that IO can be treated that way -- and in fact, Appendix D of Haskell report 1.2 indeed had described such a semantics of IO: http://haskell.org/definition/haskell-report-1.2.ps.gz (the appendix starts on p. 139). Thanks to Paul Hudak for pointing this out three years ago. Thus Haskell even with IO may be called pure functional. With Lazy IO, it can no longer be called pure functional as different orders of evaluation of arguments of a function lead to different program observations.

5 4

string type class
by Matthew Pocock 06 Mar '09

06 Mar '09

Hi, It seems every time I look at hackage there is yet another stringy datatype. For lots of apps, the particular stringy datatype you use matters for performance but not algorithmic reasons. Perhaps this is a good time for someone to propose a stringy class? Matthew

9 8

Re: [Haskell] string type class
by Wolfgang Jeltsch 06 Mar '09

06 Mar '09

Am Freitag, 6. März 2009 17:31 schrieben Sie: > What name would you suggest? If we wouldn’t have to care about compatibility, I would name the class String and drop the type alias String. It’s hard to come up with a good name since String is already taken. However, things like StringLike, Stringy, Chars etc. are probable still better than IsString since they describe the things (values of instances of that class) instead of stating a property of them. Best wishes, Wolfgang

4 3

Fully-funded doctoral studentships in dependently type programming at Oxford and Strathclyde
by Jeremy.Gibbons＠comlab.ox.ac.uk 06 Mar '09

06 Mar '09

FULLY-FUNDED DOCTORAL STUDENTSHIPS IN DEPENDENTLY-TYPED PROGRAMMING AT OXFORD AND STRATHCLYDE A new EPSRC-funded project on Reusability and Dependent Types has just started, as a collaboration between the Functional Programming Laboratory at the University of Nottingham (Thorsten Altenkirch), the Algebra of Programming group at the University of Oxford (Jeremy Gibbons), and the Mathematically Structured Programming group at the University of Strathclyde (Neil Ghani and Conor McBride). We are all familiar with Milner's slogan that "well-typed programs cannot go wrong". Types express properties of programs; more expressive type systems - such as dependent typing - can state properties more precisely, providing stronger guarantees of behaviour and additional guidance in development. However, this expressivity comes at a price: more specific typing can reduce opportunities for code reuse. The goal of this project is to investigate techniques for promoting reuse without sacrificing precision; in particular, how can we layer dependently typed programs, imposing stronger invariants onto more general library code? Two fully-funded doctoral studentships are available to work in this area: one at Oxford (with JG) and one at Strathclyde (with CTM). Each covers stipend, fees (at the home/EU rate), equipment, and travel, and is for three and a half years from October 2009. The closing date for applications is 15th April 2009. For further details, see: http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/news/72-full.html http://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/~conor/phds/ or contact one of the principal investigators on the project: Thorsten Altenkirch (txa(a)cs.nott.ac.uk) Neil Ghani (ng(a)cis.strathclyde.ac.uk) Jeremy Gibbons (jg(a)comlab.ox.ac.uk) Conor McBride (conor(a)strictlypositive.org)

1 0

(fwd) Haskell Career Opportunity
by Benjamin L.Russell 06 Mar '09

06 Mar '09

James Wood, Senior Consultant of The Kaizen Partnership, has posted the following message on fa.haskell about a Haskell career opportunity, so I am forwarding it to here for your information: On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 07:00:57 -0800 (PST), in fa.haskell James Wood <wood82(a)gmail.com> wrote: >Dear All > >I am a headhunter with a focus on tech developers predominantly in the >finance sector. Part of my focus is functional programmers especially >in Haskell, OCaml, F#. I am not sure if I am allowed to post this here >but I figured it might be relevant to some of you and so took a >chance. > >I'm currently working on a role for an Investment Bank which has >emerged unscathed from the economic turmoil and is actively looking >for highly advanced Haskell programmers. Ideally candidates will have >a MSc or PhD in Computer Science or Mathematics and will be very >comfortable programming in Haskell. The team is part of the front- >office quant analytics group and is using functional programming in >novel ways to solve some interesting problems both in both technology >and risk modelling. They are looking to add several more key hires >over the year. Finance experience is not necessary but can be >advantageous. Location can be flexible. > >There are only a few banks who have seriously invested in functional >programming and actually incorporate it as part of their >infrastructure. If anyone is interested in discussing this with me >feel free to give me a ring or email my work email, >jwood(a)kaizenpartnership.co.uk > >Thanks > >James > > >James Wood >Senior Consultant >The Kaizen Partnership > > +44 (0) 20 7710 0280 -- Benjamin L. Russell / DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/ Translator/Interpreter / Mobile: +011 81 80-3603-6725 "Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." -- Matsuo Basho^

1 0

ACCOUNCE: storable 0.1 -- Storable type class for variable-sized data
by Tomáš Janoušek 05 Mar '09

05 Mar '09

I am pleased to announce that the first release of the storable library has been uploaded to Hackage. Let me describe it in a few sentences (copied from its haddock comments): This class fills the gap between Foreign.Storable and Data.Binary. It adds support for marshalling (finite) values of variable-sized data types, like lists or trees, while preserving the performance and memory efficiency one expects from the Storable class. It also provides a (monadic) syntactic sugar that takes care of alignment restrictions by itself and makes instance deriving easy. The performance goal has not been achieved yet, of course. We are using this class to serialize values of a data type representing vertices in a Haskell-generated graph for a model checker called DiVinE (C++). http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/storable -- Tomáš Janoušek, a.k.a. Liskni_si, http://work.lisk.in/

1 0

ANN: pandoc 1.2
by John MacFarlane 05 Mar '09

05 Mar '09

I'm pleased to announce the release of pandoc version 1.2 (uploaded today to HackageDB). The most significant new feature is support for literate Haskell. You can now use pandoc directly on literate Haskell source files to produce syntax-highlighted HTML output: pandoc -s MyProg.lhs > MyProg.html Pandoc will interpret text sections as (extended) markdown. If you prefer to write literate Haskell using reStructuredText or LaTeX, pandoc supports that too: pandoc -s --from rst+lhs MyProg.lhs > MyProg.html pandoc -s --from latex+lhs MyProg.lhs > MyProg.html You can even convert from one style to another: pandoc -s --from markdown+lhs --to latex+lhs MyProg.hs This release also adds an '--email-obfuscation' option, so the user can select an email obfuscation method (or disable obfuscation), and support for citations using the latest version of Andrea Rossato's citeproc-hs. In addition, many bugs have been fixed. Thanks to everyone who filed bug reports. John

2 1

ANN: Happstack 0.2 Released
by Matthew Elder 05 Mar '09

05 Mar '09

Happstack 0.2 has been released; it is available on Hackage. A lot of community effort has gone into it! For details, please see this post: http://blog.happstack.com/2009/03/04/happstack-02-released Regards, Matthew Elder -- Need somewhere to put your code? http://patch-tag.com Want to build a webapp? http://happstack.com

1 0

ANNOUNCE: Extensible and Modular Generics for the Masses: emgm-0.3
by Sean Leather 03 Mar '09

03 Mar '09

============================================== Extensible and Modular Generics for the Masses ============================================== Extensible and Modular Generics for the Masses (EMGM) is a library for generic programming in Haskell using type classes and a sum-of-products view. ------- Updates ------- emgm-0.3 is the third major release, and it arrives a little over a month after emgm-0.2. Deriving is now greatly improved! Due to recent reports from users, we realized the current implementation just wasn't going to cut it. EMGM already supports a wide range of datatypes, so why not make the deriving code support just as many. Hopefully, it works well for you. Please let us know if your datatype is not supported. There are several new functions in the EMGM family. These include: cast (a type-safe, configurable, generic cast) and everywhere and everywhere' (functions similar to those of the same name in SYB that apply a transformation everywhere a certain type is found). ------- Changes ------- Changes from emgm-0.2 include: * Improved deriving can now handle datatype collections like this one: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/generics/2009-February/000429.html * cast function > cast :: Rep (Map a) b => a -> b * everywhere and everywhere' > everywhere :: Rep (Everywhere a) b => (a -> a) -> b -> b > everywhere' :: Rep (Everywhere' a) b => (a -> a) -> b -> b They both perform transformations on a-values in a b-value. The former does them bottom-up, the latter top-down. The names come from similar functions in SYB that use rank-2 types. Note the difference. > everywhere :: (forall a. Data a => a -> a) -> forall a. Data a => a -> a > everywhere' :: (forall a. Data a => a -> a) -> forall a. Data a => a -> a ------------ Known Issues ------------ Due to a problem with the template-haskell package and Cabal, you cannot cabal-install the emgm package with GHC 6.8. However, take heart! EMGM works very well with GHC 6.8. You merely have to download the tar.gz package from Hackage yourself, build it, and install it. Since it doesn't require any dependencies beyond what comes with GHC, installation is a breeze! ------------------- General Information ------------------- Visit the home page: http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/GenericProgramming/EMGM ---------------- General Features ---------------- The primary features of EMGM include: * Datatype-generic programming using sum-of-product views * Large collection of ready-to-use generic functions * Included support for standard datatypes: lists, Maybe, tuples * Easy to add support for new datatypes * Type classes make writing new functions straightforward in a structurally inductive style * Generic functions are extensible with ad-hoc cases for arbitrary datatypes * Good performance of generic functions The features of this distribution include: * The API is thoroughly documented with Haddock * Fully tested with QuickCheck and HUnit * Program coverage ensures that all useful code has been touched by tests * Tested on both Mac and Windows systems ------------ Requirements ------------ EMGM has the following requirements: * GHC 6.8.1 - It has been tested with versions 6.8.3 and 6.10.1 * Cabal library 1.2.1 - It has been tested with versions 1.2.4.0 and 1.6.0.1. ----------------- Download & Source ----------------- Use caball-install: cabal install emgm Get the package: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/emgm Check out the current source with Subversion: svn checkout https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/repos/dgp-haskell/EMGM/trunk Or view it online: https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/viewvc/dgp-haskell/EMGM/trunk/ -------- Examples -------- Check out the examples: https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/viewvc/dgp-haskell/EMGM/trunk/examples/ -------------- Bugs & Support -------------- Report issues or request features: http://code.google.com/p/emgm/issues/list Discuss EMGM with the authors, maintainers, and other interested persons: http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/generics ------- Credits ------- The research for EMGM originated with Ralf Hinze. It was extended with work by Bruno Oliveira and Andres Löh. More details of the library functionality were explored by Alexey Rodriguez. We are very grateful to all of these people for the foundation on which this library was built. The current authors and maintainers of EMGM are: * Sean Leather * José Pedro Magalhães * Alexey Rodriguez * Andres Löh

1 0