Haskell Weekly News: January 30, 2006 Greetings, and thanks for reading the 22nd issue of HWN, a weekly newsletter for the Haskell community. Each Monday, new editions are posted to [1]the Haskell mailing list and to [2]The Haskell Sequence. [3]RSS is also available. 1. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 2. http://sequence.complete.org/ 3. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed New Releases * C-- Frontend. Robert Dockins [4]announced the initial alpha release of a [5]C-- frontend (parser, pretty printer, and semantic checker) written in Haskell. The goal when beginning this project was to create a modular frontend that could be used both by people writing and by those targeting C-- compilers. This implementation attempts to follow the C-- spec as exactly as possible. 4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13174 5. http://www.cminusminus.org/ * Type level arithmetic. Robert Dockins [6]also released a library for arithmetic on the type level. This library uses a binary representation and can handle numbers at the order of 10^15 (at least). It also contains a test suite to help validate the somewhat unintuitive algorithms. 6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13206 Haskell' This section covers activity on [7]Haskell' this week. The topics this week have been diverse. Next week we'll try to cover activity on the wiki as well. From the mailing list: * [8]Wildcard type annotations * [9]Reworking the Numeric class * [10]Partial application ideas * [11]A more flexible hierarchical module namespace * [12]Record updates * [13]On the importance of libraries * [14]Syntactic support for existentials * [15]Module system/namespace management * [16]Fixing the monomorphism restriction * [17]k patterns * [18]~ patterns * [19]Kind annotations * [20]Class method types * [21]A Match class * [22]Scoped type variables in class instances * [23]Inline comment syntax 7. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime 8. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000001.html 9. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000002.html 10. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000004.html 11. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000009.html 12. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000014.html 13. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000023.html 14. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000031.html 15. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000032.html 16. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/15 17. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/31 18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/54 19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/65 20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/102 21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/123 22. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/28 23. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/104 Discussion * Adding Impredicative Types to GHC. Simon Peyton-Jones [24]pushed a patch into GHC to handle impredicative polymorphism (see [25]Boxy types: type inference for higher-rank types and impredicativity). Secondly, GHC now supports GADTs in the more simplified way described in [26]Simple unification-based type inference for GADTs 24. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cvs.ghc/13254 25. http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/boxy/ 26. http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/gadt/ * New IO library. Bulat Ziganshin [27]sought information on the low-level IO mechanisms used in GHC's IO libraries, in the context of his work on a high-performance IO lib. Some interesting points relating to IO primitives were raised. 27. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/9261 Darcs Corner Darcs is popular. Isaac Jones [28]brought to our attention the results of the Debian package popularity contest. For the first time a program written in Haskell is more popular than the Haskell toolchain itself. Congratulations to the darcs developers! 28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/11089 Quote of the Week <araujo> Haskell is bad, it makes you hate other programming languages. Contributing to HWN You can help us create new editions of this newsletter. Please see the [29]contributing information, send stories to dons -at- cse.unsw.edu.au. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/hwn 29. http://sequence.complete.org/hwn-contrib