Haskell Weekly News: August 23, 2005 Greetings, and thanks for reading the fourth issue of HWN, a weekly newsletter for the Haskell community. Each Tuesday, new editions will be posted (as text) to [1]the Haskell mailing list and (as HTML) to [2]The Haskell Sequence. 1. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 2. http://sequence.complete.org/ New Releases * ghc-src 0.2.0. Lemmih [3]announced ghc-src. ghc-src is a Haskell parser with full support for every GHC extension. It is based on the GHC source and is meant as a replacement for haskell-src-exts, though it could of course have other ueses. ghc-src is available via a Darcs [4]repository. * Cairo binding. Not a formal release, but [5]great progress is being made on the binding to the [6]Cairo vector graphics toolkit, including some working code. 3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/11987 4. http://scannedinavian.org/~lemmih/ghc-src/ 5. http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/archives/category/cairo/ 6. http://www.cairographics.org/introduction Discussion Category theory monads. Cale Gibbard began a [7]discussion comparing the monads from category theory with the implementation of monads in Haskell. Michael Vanier [8]suggested some of Phil Wadler's [9]papers on monads. Michael went on to say that Haskell monads are very similar to those from category theory. 7. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8044 8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8046 9. http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/monads.html More on FFI and callbacks. The [10]thread on FFI and callbacks was revived this week. Among other things, Duncan Coutts [11]noted that there is no easy way to do a really correct binding to wxWidgets from Haskell when Haskell programs are multithreaded, due to limitations in Haskell's threading model. 10. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/7862 11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8065 Oracle on Haskell. Brian Strand [12]asked about using Oracle on Haskell, and more generally, about the suitability of Haskell for database programming. Alistair Bayley [13]mentioned that [14]takusen has Oracle support. John Goerzen [15]suggested using HSQL's ODBC support, with unixODBC on *nix platforms. He went on to say that HSQL has been used in production environments. Krasimir Angelov, author of HSQL, [16]added that he's been wanting to add Oracle support to HSQL for awhile. Finally, Brian Strand later [17]followed up and said that takusen has been working well for him so far. 12. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8032 13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8033 14. http://cvs.sf.net/viewcvs.py/haskell-libs/libs/takusen/ 15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8041 16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8042 17. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8047 Pros and cons of static typing. Keean Schupke [18]revived an [19]earlier discussion about the pros and cons of static typing and side effects. 18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8020 19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/11950 Static typing and interactivity. On a similar note, Ketil Malde [20]wrote about not being able to load modules with type errors into ghci. Bernard Pope [21]suggested the type debugger in [22]Chameleon. 20. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8037 21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8045 22. http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~sulzmann/chameleon/ Argument ordering. A [23]thread about the order of arguments to functions entertained many different viewpoints this week. Too many to really summarize here. 23. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3622 Decoupling and encapsulation. Terrence Brannon [24]wrote about decoupling program elements from presentation, as in HTML generators. He included a link to his document describing architectural flaws in Perl's HTML::Mason. 24. http://sequence.complete.org/node/88 Future of The Monad.Reader. Shae Erisson wrote on #haskell today that he is looking for someone to either take over, or help with, editing [25]The Monad.Reader, Haskell's monthly online magazine. Anyone that would like to help should contact him. 25. http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/TheMonadReader How is HWN material found? I've received some questions this week about how I find material for HWN. The most obvious way is if someone sends it to me; see the link at the bottom of each HWN for contribution information. Other than that, I read the main Haskell mailing lists, the Haskell Sequence, and IRC looking for things to write about. I prefer to have stories linked in at least one of these places before covering them in HWN, since it gives readers a convenient place to follow discussion. Haskell Toolchain Cabal design. Frederik Eaton started another [26]discussion about Cabal, this time focusing on run time vs. configure time issues, the usage of custom package.conf files, and multiple cabal files in one package. Isaac Jones [27]commented on most of those items. Duncan Coutts [28]suggested the ability to register a package "in place". 26. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3625 27. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3629 28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3632 Darcs Corner Colordiff. Dmitriy Morozov [29]asked about using colordiff with darcs. Timo Savola [30]suggested a shell function to accomplish this. 29. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/8065 30. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/8066 Linus and git. Juliusz Chroboczek [31]posted a link to a discussion about Git, and mentioned that it looks like they're re-inventing some Darcs features. 31. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/8081 Success with trac. Pedro Melo [32]posted about his success using trac (a SourceForge-like system) with Darcs. 32. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/8073 Quotes of the Week Seen on #haskell today... <tuomov> define drug <Itkovian> anything that gets you addicted to <Itkovian> potentially <Itkovian> and that messes with yr senses <Lemmih> Haskell? About Haskell Weekly News Want to continue reading HWN? Please help us create new editions of this newsletter. Please see the [33]contributing information, or send stories to hwn -at- complete -dot- org. There is also a Darcs repository available. 33. http://sequence.complete.org/hwn-contrib