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ICFP Contest Reminder
by Nate Foster 31 May '04

31 May '04

There are less than 4 days until the start of the 2004 ICFP Programming Contest! The contest begins Friday (June 4) at 16:00 UTC and lasts for three days. It is open to anyone. We have a range of exciting prizes for the winners (pending final budget approval): * First prize: $1000, free conference registration for two student team members, and the satisfaction of hearing the judges proclaim your programming language "the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers." * Second prize: $300, free conference registration for one student team member, and the consolation of hearing us proclaim your programming language "a fine programming tool for many applications." * Lightning prize: $100, and the joy of hearing us esteem your programming language as "very suitable for rapid prototyping." * Judges prize: $100, and the pleasure of hearing us call you a group of "extremely cool hackers." More details can be found on our website: http://icfpcontest.org/ and in the contest announcement appended to this message. So... "Oil the treadmill bearings and feed your squirrels; check the LN2 levels in the cooling dewars; limber up your hands and pop your ibuprofen; stock up on the French roast and double-check the grinder settings, because it'll all kick loose on [Friday]!" (Shivers & Feeley, 1st ICFP Contest) --PLClub University of Pennsylvania --- Forwarded Message --- We are pleased to announce The Seventh Annual ICFP PROGRAMMING CONTEST 4 June - 7 June 2004 http://icfpcontest.org Convinced your favorite programming language provides unbeatable productivity? Convinced you and your friends are world-class programmers? If so, we're providing you the opportunity to prove it! We are pleased to announce the Seventh ICFP Programming Contest to be held in conjunction with the 2004 International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2004). All programmers are invited to enter the contest, either individually or in teams; we especially encourage students to enter. You may use any programming language (or combination of languages) to show your skill. On Friday, 4 June 2004 at 16:00 UTC (12:00 noon EDT), we will publish a challenge task on the Web site and by e-mail to the contest mailing list. Teams will have 72 hours until Monday, 7 June 2004, 16:00 UTC (12:00 noon EDT) to implement a program to perform this task and submit it to the contest judges. We have designed the contest for direct, head-to-head comparison of language technology and programming skill. We have a range of prizes including cash awards and, of course, unlimited bragging rights for the winners. For more information about the contest, prizes, and registration, point your browser to the contest website: http://icfpcontest.org For more information about previous contests, see: http://icfpcontest.org/history.php -- 2004 Contest Team

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CFP: Haskell Workshop 2004
by Henrik Nilsson 28 May '04

28 May '04

Please find enclosed the Call For Papers for the 2004 Haskell Workshop, to be held on 22 September in Snowbird, Utah, USA in association with ICFP'04. The submission deadline is 4 June: just a little more than a month away! See http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~nhn/HW2004/ for further details, including Call For Papers in PDF/HTML format. My apologies for multiple copies. Best regards, /Henrik -- Henrik Nilsson School of Computer Science and Information Technology The University of Nottingham nhn(a)cs.nott.ac.uk 2004 Haskell Workshop Snowbird, Utah, USA, 22 September, 2004 http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~nhn/HW2004 Call For Papers The Haskell Workshop 2004 is an ACM SIGPLAN sponsored workshop affiliated with the 2004 International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). Previous Haskell Workshops have been held in La Jolla (1995), Amsterdam (1997), Paris (1999), Montreal (2000), Firenze (2001), Pittsburgh (2002), and Uppsala (2003). ******************** Scope ******************** The purpose of the Haskell Workshop is to discuss experience with Haskell, and possible future developments for the language. The scope of the workshop includes all aspects of the design, semantics, theory, application, imple- mentation, and teaching of Haskell. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: Language Design with a focus on possible extensions and modifications of Haskell as well as critical discussions of the status quo; Theory in the form of a formal treatment of the semantics of the present language or future extensions, type systems, and foundations for program analysis and transformation; Implementation Techniques including program analysis and transformation, static and dynamic compilation for sequential, parallel, and distributed architectures, memory management as well as foreign function and component interfaces; Tool Support in the form of profilers, tracers, debuggers, pre-processors, and so forth; Applications, Practice, and Experience with Haskell for scientific and symbolic computing, database, multimedia and Web applications, and so forth as well as general experience with Haskell in education and industry; Functional Pearls being elegant, instructive examples of using Haskell. Papers in the latter two categories need not necessarily report original research results; they may instead, for example, report practical experience that will be useful to others, re-usable programming idioms, or elegant new ways of approaching a problem. The key criterion for such a paper is that it makes a contribution from which other practitioners can benefit. It is not enough simply to describe a program! The programme committee welcomes short papers and may accept them for brief presentation at the workshop. ******************** Submission Details ******************** Deadline for submission: 4 June, 2004 Notification of acceptance: 5 July, 2004 Final submission due: 30 July, 2004 (tentative) Haskell Workshop: 22 September, 2004 Authors should submit papers in postscript format, formatted for A4 paper, to Henrik Nilsson (nhn(a)cs.nott.ac.uk) by 4 June 2004. The length should be restricted to the equivalent of 5000 words (which is approximately 12 pages in ACM format). The papers will be published by the ACM and will appear in the ACM Digital Library. If you are interested in demonstrating a Haskell-related system or tool, please send a brief demo proposal to Henrik Nilsson (nhn(a)cs.nott.ac.uk) ******************** Programme Committee ******************** Jörgen Gustavsson Chalmers Thomas Hallgren OGI Jerzy Karczmarczuk Université de Caen Daan Leijen Universiteit Utrecht Henrik Nilsson (chair) University of Nottingham Colin Runciman University of York Martin Sulzmann National University of Singapore Valery Trifonov Yale University

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Bug in experimental Unicode support for Hugs?
by Graham Klyne 28 May '04

28 May '04

I've noticed a discrepancy in by version of Hugs with experimental Unicode support enabled, based on the 20040109 codebase. It's exemplified by this: [[ Main> '\x10ffff' '\1114111' Main> maxBound::Char '\255' Main> ]] It appears that this value is hardcoded in Hugs/Prelude.hs, rather than obtained from the runtime environment in some way. #g ------------ Graham Klyne For email: http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact

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ANNOUNCE: buddha version 1.2 released
by Bernard James POPE 28 May '04

28 May '04

Announcing buddha version 1.2 ----------------------------- www.cs.mu.oz.au/~bjpop/buddha New in this release: - a completely new transformation algorithm - colour output - "dot" graphs of the call-graph and of values (shows sharing) (i.e. pretty pictures) - improved call-graph browsing - the command line is based on readline which provides nice editing facilities - a new build system using autoconf and automake which makes it much easier to package - C pre-processor support - an "observe" command that can show you all the calls to a given function or constant - the interface is more configurable than before - a debian package Support for the 5.x series of GHC has been dropped. Sadly there is still no support for hierarchical modules (sorry). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Buddha is a declarative debugger for Haskell 98. It is based on program transformation and works with GHC 6.x. Buddha offers a declarative debugging algorithm and a browsing mechanism. It is useful for finding logical errors in programs and for exploring computations in a high-level manner. The interface is designed to be simple to use, and may be an ideal aid for teaching Haskell. Version 1.2 is known to work on GNU/linux/x86, GNU/linux/alpha, Darwin, FreeBSD, solaris/x86. It does not (as far as I know) work on Windows. Buddha is released under the GPL license. Enjoy, Bernie.

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ANNOUNCE: hs-plugins-0.9.4
by dons＠cse.unsw.edu.au 28 May '04

28 May '04

A new version of the hs-plugins library has been released, v0.9.4 http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/hs-plugins It features some nice improvements over the last few releases: * the library can now parse standard .hi files to work out a plugin's dependencies, so no more .dep files * when finding package dependencies, it now consults the system or user supplied package.conf files, rather than guessing where packages live, and what they depend on. Thanks to Sean Seefried for implementing this. * it comes with a 98 line haskell interpreter in the style of hmake, illustrating how to create an embedded Haskell interpreter via make() and load(). * many more examples Bug fixes as well. Enjoy, Don

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ANNOUNCE: DrIFT 2.0.4
by John Meacham 28 May '04

28 May '04

I have not made an annoucement in a while, but there have been several DrIFT releases, So this will be a lump announcement for the last few. http://repetae.net/john/computer/haskell/DrIFT/ some highlights: a script is included to make ghc much easier to use. simply call ghc with the options "-F -pgmF drift-ghc" and everything will "just work". syntax fixes: infix constructors, strictness annotations, newtype record syntax. GhcBinary deriving rule to derive byte based ghc binary instances deriving 'update' gives much more useful functions now. for each label foo you get foo_u and foo_s to update and set the field respectivly, these can now be used on any data value of the appropriate type, passing through values that don't have the required field untouched. see http://repetae.net/john/computer/haskell/DrIFT/Changelog for the complete changelog. John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈

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getting at performance metainfo
by John Meacham 26 May '04

26 May '04

I was playing with modifying QuickCheck to automatically benchmark the routines as well as testing them for validity and something I have wanted for a while now is a way to get at performance numbers from within a haskell program itself. something like data RunStats = RunStats { rsThunksCreated :: Integer, rsMemAlloced :: Integer, rsMemFreed :: Integer, rsCpuCycles :: Integer, rsClockTime :: Integer, rsEvals :: Integer, rsAlreadyWHNF :: Bool } and a function evaluateStats :: a -> IO (a,RunStats) which evaluates a to WHNF and returns the statistics of all resources used in doing so. Now, probably a lot of the info I gave above might not be available depending on the specifics of the runtime system, but some should be, perhays more if profiling is turned on when compiling. Any idea if this is plausable to implement? I think it could be very useful in 'real-world' programming and evaluating data structures and algorithms programatically. John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈

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POPL 05 Call for Papers
by David Walker 26 May '04

26 May '04

POPL 2005 Call for Papers 32nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN - SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages Long Beach, California January 12-14, 2005 http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/popl/05/ Important Dates --------------- Submission deadlines: titles and short abstracts: Friday, July 9, 2004, 17:00 UTC/GMT full papers: Friday, July 16, 2004, 17:00 UTC/GMT Notification of acceptance: Monday, September 20, 2004 Final papers due: Monday, November 1, 2004 Conference: January 12-14, 2005 Please note that the submission format is different this year. See below for submission guidelines and LaTeX style files. Scope of the Conference ----------------------- The annual Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages is a forum for the discussion of fundamental principles and important innovations in the design, definition, analysis, transformation, implementation and verification of programming languages, programming systems, and programming abstractions. Both experimental and theoretical papers on principles and innovations are welcome, ranging from formal frameworks to reports on practical experiences. Submissions on a diversity of topics are sought, particularly ones that identify new research directions. POPL 2005 is not limited to topics discussed in previous symposia. Authors concerned about the appropriateness of a topic may communicate by electronic mail with the program chair prior to submission. Submission Guidelines --------------------- Submissions should be full papers, similar in scope and size to what would appear in the proceedings of the symposium. Formatting requirements for submissions and other details are given below. Submissions will be judged on originality, significance, correctness, and clarity. A submitted paper should clearly express the contribution of the work, both in general and in technical terms. It is essential to identify what was accomplished, describe the significance of the work, and explain how the paper compares with, and improves upon, previous work. Authors should bear in mind that individual program-committee members will be asked to referee many submissions; while every effort will be made to assign submissions to an appropriate subset of the program committee, very few papers are likely to be reviewed solely by experts in a paper's topic area. A good rule of thumb is that an informed colleague (with expertise in programming languages) should be able to form an initial judgment of the technical content of a submission in 40 minutes. Some advice about how to prepare a good submission can be found at: http://www.acm.org/sigplan/conferences/author-info/ Submitted papers must describe work unpublished in refereed venues, and not submitted for publication elsewhere (including journals and formal proceedings of conferences and workshops). See the SIGPLAN republication policy for more details. Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by September 20, 2004. The final version of accepted papers must be received in camera-ready form by November 1, 2004 for inclusion in the proceedings. Authors of accepted papers will be required to sign ACM copyright release forms. Proceedings will be published by ACM Press. Submission Details ------------------ Submissions, including text, figures, and bibliography must fit in 15 pages, on two columns, with 10 point font on 12 point baseline, columns 20pc (3.33in) wide and 54pc (9in) tall with a column gutter of 2pc (0.33in). Pages should be numbered. (Please note that this is not the standard ACM proceedings format: it is less compact, and the page limit is correspondingly higher.) We encourage the use of LaTeX class file (acmconfbig.cls) or LaTeX style file (acmconfbig.sty) located off the conference web site. Authors who feel it is absolutely necessary to include additional material may place it in a well-marked appendix after page 15, but committee members are under no obligation to review this material. Titles, abstracts, and full papers should be submitted via the Web. The POPL web site http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/popl/05/ will contain a link to the submission site. The full papers should be in PDF (preferably) or Postscript that is interpretable by Ghostscript and printable on US Letter and A4 size paper. The submission deadline for titles and short abstracts is Friday, July 9, 2004, 17:00 UTC/GMT. The submission deadline for the corresponding full papers is Friday, July 16, 2004, 17:00 UTC/GMT. Submissions deviating from these specifications and late submissions may not be considered. Program Chair: -------------- Martín Abadi University of California, Santa Cruz Computer Science Department Santa Cruz, CA 95064 E-mail: abadi(a)cs.ucsc.edu General Chair: -------------- Jens Palsberg University of California, Los Angeles Computer Science Dept, 4531K Boelter Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095 Phone: 310-825-6320 Fax: 310-794-5057 E-mail: palsberg(a)ucla.edu Program Committee: ------------------ Martín Abadi, UC Santa Cruz (chair) Rastislav Bodik, UC Berkeley Perry Cheng, IBM (T.J. Watson Research Center) William Cook, UT Austin Michael Ernst, MIT Giorgio Ghelli, Università di Pisa Yossi Gil, Technion Ralf Hinze, Universität Bonn Martin Hofmann, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Alan Jeffrey, DePaul University Andrew Kennedy, Microsoft Research (Cambridge) Naoki Kobayashi, Tokyo Institute of Technology Julia Lawall, University of Copenhagen Andrew Myers, Cornell University Gordon Plotkin, University of Edinburgh François Pottier, INRIA (Rocquencourt) Sriram Rajamani, Microsoft Research (Redmond) John Reppy, University of Chicago Zhong Shao, Yale University Henny Sipma, Stanford University

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RE: [Haskell] ANNOUNCE: Haskell Communities & Activities Report (6th ed., May2004)
by Simon Peyton-Jones 25 May '04

25 May '04

| Just a bit more than half a year after the previous edition, I am | pleased to announce on behalf of the many contributers that the | | Haskell Communities and Activities Report | (6th edition, May 2004) I'd like to say a big thank-you to Arthur for doing this. The costs fall mainly on him, but we all get the benefits. The Haskell Communities and Activities report is a fantastic gob of glue that helps to give the Haskell community coherence and focus. There's always far more going on than I expect! Thanks Arthur. And a massive thank-you to ex-editor Claus too. Simon

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[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: Haskell Communities & Activities Report (6th ed., May 2004)
by Arthur van Leeuwen 25 May '04

25 May '04

Just a bit more than half a year after the previous edition, I am pleased to announce on behalf of the many contributers that the Haskell Communities and Activities Report (6th edition, May 2004) http://www.haskell.org/communities/ is now available from the Haskell Communities home page in several formats: PDF, for screenreading as well as printing, HTML, for those of you who prefer not to deal with plugins or external viewers, and PostScript, for those of you who have nice quick printers that do not grok PDF. Many thanks go to all the people that contributed to this report, both directly, by sending in descriptions, and indirectly, by doing all the interesting things that are reported. I hope you will find it as interesting a read as we did. If you haven't encountered the Haskell Communities and Activities Reports before, you may like to know that the first of these reports was published in November 2001. Their goal is to improve the communication between the increasingly diverse groups, projects and individuals working on, with, or inspired by Haskell. The idea behind these reports is simple: Every six months, a call goes out to all of you enjoying Haskell to contribute brief summaries of your own area of work. Many of you respond (eagerly, unprompted, and well in time for the actual deadline ;) ) to the call. The editor collects all the contributions into a single report and feeds that back to the community When we try for the next update, six months from now, you might want to report on your own work, project, research area or group as well. So, please put the following into your diaries now: ---------------------------------------- End of October 2004: target deadline for contributions to the October 2004 edition of the HC&A Report ---------------------------------------- Unfortunately, many Haskellers working on interesting projects are so busy with their work that they seem to have lost the time to follow the Haskell related mailing lists and newsgroups, and have trouble even finding time to report on their work. If you are a member, user or friend of a project so burdened, please find someone willing to make time to report and ask them to `register' with the editor for a simple e-mail reminder in the middle of October (you could point us to them as well, and we can then politely ask if they want to contribute, but it might work better if you do the initial asking). Ofcourse, they will still have to find the ten to fifteen minutes to draw up their report, but maybe we can increase our coverage of all that is going on in the community. Enjoy, communicate, and program! Arthur van Leeuwen -- /\ / | arthurvl%2Bhcar(a)cs.uu.nl | Work like you don't need the money /__\ / | A friend is someone with whom | Love like you have never been hurt / \/__ | you can dare to be yourself | Dance like there's nobody watching

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