Dear Haskellers, after the first rush of volunteers seems to have ebbed away, it is probably time for a reminder. First, the good news: We have just about enough topics covered to convince me that it makes sense to go ahead. So the Haskell Communities page has moved to a more permanent location at http://www.haskell.org/communities/ and any further documents will appear there as well. I even have the first reports coming in already (thanks very much!). If everyone else could please send in their reports over the next two weeks, i.e., before *** Monday, 29. October 2001 ***, then I could try to edit everything together in the following week (modulo my own deadlines..) and put out the first version of the collective Haskell Communities Status Report early in November. Simon Marlow sent a nice example of a (more frequent) report from the FreeBSD community, which might give an idea of how a collection of brief summaries can help to get and keep an overview of a field: http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/159/2001/9/150/6646127/ So far, so good. The not so good news is that there are still some quite important areas uncovered, so *** we are still looking for active Haskellers *** *** to write (and send to me) brief summaries. *** Below, you'll find first a list of topics I would like to see covered, then the list of topics for which we already have volunteers. If you think you can help out with information on one or more of the outstanding topics, please let me know. If you have the information, but are unsure about what would be a useful summary for the report, get in touch with me and we'll see what we can do. Cheers, Claus ------------------------------------ contacts still needed: ------------ core * Haskell Central changes over the last year, plans for the next few months? * Hugs often feared to be dying, but kept very much alive by enthusiasts; Currently, OGI and other enthusiastic volunteers are supporting. Any ideas about the future? What about the new release (when, what)? * nhc98 lots of new work there, though much of it will probably be covered by Olaf's report on tracing and debugging? !! for all implementations, it would be nice to know the !! position and status regarding recent extensions that !! need support to be portable, such as FFI, hierarchical !! modules namespace, portable libraries, GUI API & libraries. ------------ others * non-sequential Haskell This is an important and active area, and we seem to have lots of projects there. Ideally, someone in the field could give an overview of the state-of-the-art, but I would also be happy to get summaries from individual projects (we've got Concurrent Haskell, but nothing else yet; what about GPH, port-based distributed Haskell, ..?). [and why is there no dedicated mailing-list for the collection of non-sequential Haskell projects?] * meta programming support for Haskell Tim Sheard would like to start a project on a Haskell version of Meta ML. Any progress there? Meanwhile, there are a small number of Haskell parsers and pretty-printers around. But how complete are they, are they being kept up to date, what about language extensions? What about a standard AST format? What about static analysis and type checking/inference? A standard interface to symbol table information? Partial evaluation for Haskell?-) Reification/reflection (Bernard Pope and Lee Naish have done some work here in the context of declarative debugging)? Why all the extra tools, btw? Could we not have a standard interface to the parsers, type checkers, symbol tables that exist in our Haskell implementations (as is the case for other respectable languages?-) * lightweight modules for Haskell At this year's Haskell workshop, Mark Shields asked those interested to cooperate on this topic to contact him, mentioning that he was working on the topic. It would be useful to have an idea of the plans there. Aha, I've just found a brand new paper on that, perhaps Mark could give a brief summary of that and the implementation plans?-) * Haskell libraries collection will that be covered in the report on hierarchical module namespaces or do we need a separate report? Simon? * FFI tools Manuel will cover FFI language extensions and libraries, as well as his own C->Haskell, but what about the other tools built on top of the FFI basis? What is the status of Greencard, Hdirect & co? What about all that recent talk about new Haskell to Java connections?-) If anything is still (or newly) active: summaries&pointers, please! * Documentation tools earlier this year, there was some work and discussion on this. Anyone willing to summarise the results? * Applications Perhaps someone at Galois Connections could summarise their recent successes and immediate plans (I've heard lots of good news from that direction recently)? Haskell in hardware specification and verification? ..others.. * Formal basis The effective lack of a formal semantics for Haskell has been a constant source of embarrassment (functional languages: solid theoretical basis, effective reasoning about programs, ...; Haskell: ???, ahem, oops). There seems to have been some progress recently, and it would be nice to hear more about all that. E.g., what state the work is in, what the immediate plans are, where to get the (draft) deliverables, if any: - Karl-Filip Faxen, KTH Stockholm, has been working on a formalisation of Haskell's static semantics. - the Programmatica project at OGI, Oregon, has been working on an implementation of Haskell's static semantics in Haskell; and had to ask for clarification of ambiguities in the ongoing revisions of the Haskell 98 language report. - Andrew Tolmach, OGI, has been working on a formal specification of GHC's version of core Haskell, the subset into which full Haskell is translated for definition, compilation and optimisation. - the functional programming group at York has been working on operational semantics for Haskell to support their work on profiling and tracing, to enable reasoning about time and space behaviour, and about execution traces. - .. other work in this area..? ------------------------------------ volunteers so far: GHC Simon Peyton-Jones Foreign function interface (language extensions & libraries) Manuel Chakravarty Hierarchical module namespaces Simon Marlow GUI library API new task force [summarised by Manuel's recent announcement] Concurrent Haskell Simon Marlow Generic programming Johan Jeuring [report done!] Tracing and debugging Olaf Chitil Happy Simon Marlow C->Haskell Manuel Chakravarty Functional Reactive Programming (at Yale) John Peterson