Haskell Weekly News: September 13, 2005 Greetings, and thanks for reading the seventh 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 * CabalFind 0.1. Dimitry Golubovsky [3]announced CabalFind 0.1, an interface to search engines such as Google and Yahoo designed to help find Cabalized packages out on the Internet. 3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8214 * gtk2hs with Cairo. Duncan Coutts [4]announced a special release of gtk2hs as a "tech preview" of the included Cairo bindings. Some impressive screenshots are in there as well. 4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12082 * OOHaskell. Ralf Laemmel and Olaf Kiselyov [5]announced a new version of their paper, "Haskell's overlooked object system" and its accompanying library. 5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12077 * StringMap. Adrian Hey [6]announced his new module, Data.StringMap, which provides mapes from String keys to arbitrary values. 6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12104 * AVL 2.3. Adrian Hey [7]announced version 2.3 of his Data.Tree.AVL library, adding a few new features and a bit of renaming. 7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3714 Discussion Why is HWN a day late this week? Your HWN editor was stuck in some large airports that had a [8]surprising lack of Wifi. Sigh. 8. http://changelog.complete.org/node/388 Binary parser combinators. Einar Karttunen [9]asked about a binary parser combinator interface for network protocol parsing. Malcolm Wallac pointed out that nhc98 has a Binary library with a "<<" operator that could be useful. 9. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8256 Windows programming in Haskell. Brian McQueen [10]asked about Windows programming in Haskell, including access to the Windows registry, APIs, and communicating with other Windows apps. Several suggestions relating to Hugs were offered, including .NET support and some libraries. 10. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8221 Functional vs. Imperative. Dhaemon began an [11]interesting discussion by asking for some help understanding functional vs. imperative approaches. Several people commented on the IO monad, and how it is still a functional interface even though it may appear imperative at first glance. 11. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8254 Mixing monadic and non-monadic functions. A long [12]thread on this subject appeared in the Haskell list this week. Rather too long to summarize here -- take a look at the link. 12. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12077 Language workbenches. Yoel Jacobsen [13]wrote about an article on language workbenches, in which configuration files are actually valid code in a general-purpose language. Yoel went on to ask about doing this in Haskell. Some suggestions, such as hs-plugins, were offered. 13. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8227 Types in Template Haskell. Gracjan Polak [14]posted about some trouble with typing in Template Haskell. Several responses regarding quoting types were posted, including a reference to Simon Marlow's "update" [15]paper. 14. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8235 15. http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/tmp/notes2.ps Web applications. Gary began a large [16]discussion by asking about writing Web applications. Several options were mentioned, including Wash and HAppS. S. Alexander Jacobsen [17]mentioned that he will be launching a commercial chat service using Haskell and AJAX with HAppS as the underlying core. 16. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8215 17. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8242 Calling Haskell from C++. Felix Breuer [18]wrote about some trouble calling into Haskell from C++ programs. Several suggestions were provided, mostly relating to C++ name mangling. 18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/8652 What gets profiled? Niels began a [19]discussion on the use of profiling features by commenting that profiling didn't seem to show the problem in his own code. Several suggestions regarding memory use and possible reasons that profilers might miss things were provided. 19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/8622 Haskell Toolchain GHC 6.4.1. Simon Marlow posted an [20]update on GHC 6.4.1. Though more bug reports have been rolling in while he was away, only a few are blockers for 6.4.1. The tentative release date is September 19. 20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/8649 Data.Monoid. Ross Paterson [21]proposed replacing an instance of Data.Monoid. There was some discussion about whether the old or new instance was better. 21. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3719 Quotes of the Week <poetix> "Oh, a monad...that's just a funny name for a particular sort of arrow" <mcnster> Chocolate Frosted Monads, new from Cadbury <mcnster> ... "All the sugar, twice the arrows" <mcnster> Mr. Tweedsmuir, we're going to have to bypass your left ventrical monad. You'll probably never play Chopin again <poetix> Readers of the ABC Warriors strip in 2000AD may remember The Monad as the concentrated essence of human evil <mcnster> Monadocet. Because category theory should be understood by everyone. 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