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Haskell Weekly News: July 4, 2009

Posted 2 days ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: July 04, 2009
Welcome to issue 124 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements HLint 1.6. Neil ... [More] Mitchell
announced
the release of HLint
1.6, a tool for automatically suggesting improvements to Haskell
code.

Haskell Implementers Workshop: accepted talks. Simon Marlow
announced
that the list of talks at the Haskell
Implementers Workshop 2009 has now been posted.

bloxorz clone. Patai Gergely
announced
a Haskell
clone of the game "bloxorz", written by Viktor Devecseri.

Fun with type functions. Simon Peyton-Jones
announced
that he, Ken Shan, and Oleg have finished Version 2 of their paper
"Fun with Type Functions", which gives a programmer's tour of what type
functions are and how they are useful. If you have a moment to look at, and
wanted to help them improve it, leave comments on the linked wiki page.

package Boolean: Generalized booleans. Conal Elliott
announced
Boolean,
a new package for generalized booleans, which provides type classes
with generalizations of Boolean values and operations, if-then-else,
Eq and Ord.

TernaryTrees-0.1.1.1 - An efficient ternary tree implementation of
Sets and Maps. Alex Mason
announced
the release of TernaryTrees, a
package that extends Data.Set ad Data.Map with some ternary tree structures,
one of the more efficient ways of storing strings in a set.

6.12.1 planning. Simon Marlow
announced
plans for a release of GHC 6.12.1, sometime around September. If you
have the time and inclination to help with any of the listed features,
please get involved!

regular-0.1. José Pedro Magalhães
announced
the release of the regular
library. Many generic programs require information about the
recursive positions of a data type, such as generic fold, generic
rewriting, and the Zipper data structure. Regular provides
a fixed point view on data which allows these definitions
for regular data types. It also serves as the basis for a generic
rewriting library.

Google Summer of Code Progress
updates from participants in the 2008 Google
Summer of Code.

Haddock improvements. Isaac Dupree
has made it easier to generate Haddock documentation for
non-exported functions, posted an overview
of the issues involved in getting proper
cross-package documentation working, and his current plan.

EclipseFP. Thomas Ten Cate
has done a lot of work on EclipseFP, including some cosmetic
updates and getting error
reporting to work better.

space profiling. Gergely Patai
is working
on a network protocol for his profiling grapher tool, so that other
tools can monitor the profiling information.

haskell-src-exts. Niklas Broberg
has released
haskell-src-exts
version 1.0.0!

fast darcs. Petr Rockai
has completed quite
a bit of work on darcs, including a beta release
of darcs 2.3.

Discussion Monoid wants a (++) equivalent. Bryan
O'Sullivan
suggested
adding a more concise operator to the Monoid class for 'mappend', leading
to a long, bike-shed-ish (but hopefully still useful) discussion.

Reflections on the ICFP 2009 programming contest. Justin Bailey
began a discussion
on results and experiences from the ICFP 2009 programming contest.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them! Gergely Patai: Playing
and learning.

Ketil Malde: A
set of tools for working with 454
sequences.

Sebastian Fischer: FP
Overview.

Magnus Therning: Making a choice from
a list in Haskell, Vty (part 1).

David Amos: Conjugacy
classes, part 1.

Well-Typed.Com: GHC and
Windows DLLs.

Manuel M T Chakravarty:
Converting
typed term representations: from HOAS to de
Bruijn..

>>> Ivan Uemlianin: Haskell:
sort and sortBy.

Gregory Collins: Building
a website with Haskell, part
3.

Michael Snoyman: Hack
sample- chat server.

Luke Palmer: On
the By functions.

Magnus Therning: Dataenc finally
making it into Debian.

Thomas ten Cate: New
build instructions.

Erik de Castro Lopo: Three
More for the Debian New
Queue.

>>> Yuval Kogman: What
Haskell did to my brain.

Greg Bacon: FFI:
calling into kernel32.dll.

Greg Bacon: Setting
up a simple test with Cabal.

Ketil Malde: Dephd
updates.

Bryan O'Sullivan: What's
in a text API?.

Brent Yorgey: 2009
ICFP programming contest
reflections.

Galois, Inc: Galois,
Inc. Wins Two Small Business Research Awards from
Federal Agencies.

Greg Bacon: Cleaning
up your Haskell imports.

Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Realized
Constants are Comonadic.

Quotes of the Week KF8NH: all monads are functors,
but for Hysterical Raisins not all Monads are Functors.
lilac: lambda actually is just the greek letter l. it stands
for lilac. lilac: before mauke we all implemented
map with a fold every time we needed it. luqui: I'll
just stick to my religion: I have a personal relationship with our lord
and savior, the untyped lambda calculus. copumpkin:
I think I was implemented in haskell. I mean, my parents never used seq,
ever. Benjamin Russell: Haskell. "Avoid success at
all costs." Made with dinosaur technology.
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

To help create new editions of this newsletter, please
see the information on how
to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn
dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/
.

[Less]

Haskell Weekly News: June 29, 2009

Posted 7 days ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: June 29, 2009
Welcome to issue 123 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

A bit late this week since over the ... [More] weekend I was trying to get some unruly
satellites to behave (with moderate success). Anyway, some fun stuff this
week: Haskell on the iPhone; new libraries for 3D animation, web development,
session types; new releases of haskell-src-exts and darcs; and more. Also,
if it seems that there haven't been many quotes lately, it's because people
haven't been @remembering very many in #haskell. I cannot telepathically
sense (via the Haskell-force, hereafter known as the "Horce") when someone
says something funny.

Announcements Haskell Symposium
call for participation. Stephanie Weirich
announced
that registration
is now open for the ACM SIGPLAN Haskell
Symposium 2009, to be held on 3 September 2009 in Edinburgh, Scotland
(co-located with ICFP). The purpose of the Haskell Symposium is to discuss
experiences with Haskell and future developments for the language. The
scope of the symposium includes all aspects of the design, semantics,
theory, application, implementation, and teaching of Haskell.

jhc 0.6.1. John Meacham
announced
the release of jhc 0.6.1,
featuring a a much simplified
cross-compilation mechanism.

X Haskell Bindings 0.3. Antoine
Latter
announced
the 0.3.* series release of the X
Haskell Bindings. This release, like the prior 0.2.* series focuses
on making
the API prettier.

happstack-0.3.2. Matthew Elder
announced
the release of happstack-0.3.2,
with many changes, updates, and bug fixes.

sendfile-0.1. Matthew Elder
announced
the release of sendfile, a library
which exposes zero-copy sendfile functionality in a portable way. Right
now it natively supports linux 2.6+ (maybe older too) and windows 2000+;
on other platforms it will fall back seamlessly to a portable haskell
implementation.

Reusable Corecursive Queues via Continuations. Leon Smith
requested
feedback on a draft of an upcoming article in Monad.Reader
issue 14, "Lloyd Allison's Corecursive Queues: Why
Continuations Matter", describing the implementation of the control-monad-queue
package.

Haskell on the iPhone. Ryan Trinkle
announced
that his company, iPwn Studios Inc., is currently preparing to release
an open source patch to GHC that allows it to output binaries for iPhone
OS. The patch will be released under a BSD license as soon as possible
and hopefully integrated into the GHC main-line in the near future.

Program to set the GNOME desktop background picture randomly. Colin
Paul Adams
announced
gnome-desktop,
a library which periodically picks a random picture from $HOME/Pictures,
and sets it as the GNOME desktop background.

loli: a minimal web dev DSL. Jinjing Wang
announced
the release of loli,
a web development DSL built on top of hack.
It allows you to easily define routes, build your custom template
backends through a simple Template interface, and integrate with other
hack middleware.

Cal3D animation library. Gregory D. Weber
announced
the Cal3D
for Haskell project, which provides a partial binding to the C++ Cal3D animation library, a
platform- and graphics-API-independent C++ library for skeletal-based
character animation. There are three packages available on hackage: cal3d-0.1,
a Haskell binding to the Cal3D library itself; as well as cal3d-opengl-0.1
and cal3d-examples-0.1.

A Reader Monad Tutorial. Henry Laxen
announced
a nice Reader
monad tutorial.

full-sessions: yet another implementation of session types. Keigo
Imai
announced
the pre-release of full-sessions,
yet another implementation of session types in Haskell. Session
types are used to statically check the safe and consistent use of
communication channels according to protocols. A notable advantage of this
implementation is that it requires almost no type annotation or term
annotations. and at the same time provides full functionality of session
types including channel-generation and channel-passing.

darcs 2.3 beta 1. Petr Rockai
announced
the immediate availability of a first beta release of darcs 2.3. There
are a number of improvements and bugfixes over the last stable release,
2.2 (see the announcement for a full list). Moreover, work has been
done on performance of "darcs whatsnew" for large repositories. This
has also introduced a slight risk of regressions, but please note
that all of the disruptive changes are in read-only code paths: the
new code will never touch your repository, so it is unable to cause
permanent harm. The worst that could happen is that you get no or
bad diff from "darcs whatsnew". Please help test it (cabal install darcs-beta)!

New release of ZeroTH. Robin Green
announced
a new release (2009.6.23.3) of ZeroTH, a tool for
preprocessing Haskell code to run splices and remove Template Haskell
dependencies. Major changes include support for more Haskell code via
haskell-src-exts 1.0.0, better error messages, and librification.

Emping-0.6 and Tests/Examples. Hans van Thiel
announced
version 0.6 of Emping,
a (prototype) interactive tool for the discovery and analysis of (universal,
not statistical) predictive rules in tables of nominal data.

haskell-src-exts-1.0.0. Niklas Broberg
announced
the first stable release of the haskell-src-exts
package, version 1.0.0! haskell-src-exts is a package for Haskell
source code manipulation. In particular it defines an abstract syntax tree
representation, and a parser and pretty-printer to convert between this
representation and String. It handles (almost) all syntactic extensions
to the Haskell 98 standard implemented by GHC, and the parsing can be
parametrised on what extensions to recognise.

HaRe (the Haskell Refactorer) in action - short screencast. Claus
Reinke
linked
to a short video
showing HaRe,
the Haskell refactorer, in action. HaRe still exists---but needs some
love in the form of time and/or funding for maintenance and continued
development.

Trivial pivoting for the DSP lu decomposition. Fernan Bolando
announced
the beginnings of a simple
circuit simulator using haskell, which uses a modified version of
the haskell DSP library matrix, extended with a simple pivoting method.

Discussion make some Applicative functions into methods,
and split off Data.Functor. Ross Paterson
proposed
moving several functions such as (<$), (*>), and so on into their
respective classes with default definitions, to allow for specialized
implementations.

base library and GHC 6.12. Ian Lynagh
began a discussion
about how to structure the base library in the future.

Proposal: ExplicitForall. Niklas Broberg
proposed
adding a new GHC extension, ExplicitForall, to be used for turning on
explicit 'forall' syntax in types, and to help disentangle and simplify
some existing extensions.

Generic Graph Class. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
proposed
a generic graph class to serve as a common interface for the many Haskell
libraries that deal with graph data structures.

Type system trickery. Andrew Coppin
asked
how to statically ensure certain properties of recursive data structures
with the type system, generating varied suggestions involving GADTs.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them! Magnus Therning: Making a choice from a
list in Haskell, Vty (part 0).

The Gentoo Haskell Team: Haskell
in Gentoo.

Michael Snoyman: Hack
Introduction.

>>> Henry Laxen: Reader
Monad Confusion.

>>> Akshay: Dynamic
Programming in Haskell and why DP is
useful.

David Amos: Direct
products revisited.

mightybyte: Basic
Happstack Blog App.

David Amos: Some
groups and some graphs.

Gergely Patai: Short-term
hp2any plans.

Isaac Dupree: cross-package,
Plan A.

>>> Oliver Reeves: Data
Crunching in Haskell.

Roman Cheplyaka: Halting
problem.

Petr Rockai: darcs
2.3 beta 1.

Eric Kow (kowey): Haskell
syntax highlighting on Wikipedia and
Wikibooks.

Greg Bacon: Setting
up a simple test with Cabal.

Isaac Dupree: Cross-package
documentation, part 1.

Sean Leather: RFC:
Extensible, typed scanf- and printf-like functions
for Haskell.

>>> Akshay: Foray
Into Haskell.

>>> Ivan Uemlianin: decorate-sort-undecorate
in Haskell.

Isaac Dupree: How
To Navigate Your Code:.

Petr Rockai: soc
progress 5.

DEFUN 2009: The
tutorial schedule is now ready.

DEFUN 2009: Last
call for talk proposals!.

>>> Greg Bacon: Setting
up a simple test with Cabal.

The GHC Team: New
paper: Parallel Performance Tuning for
Haskell.

Brandon Simmons: Fun
with Lazy Arrays: the LZ77
Algorithm.

>>> Keith: Bird
Tracks Through Math Land: Basic Matrix Ops.

Quotes of the Week gnuvince: Contributions to
Hackage are measured in µConals.
DavidWheeler: Compatibility means deliberately repeating
other people's mistakes.
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

To help create new editions of this newsletter, please
see the information on how
to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn
dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/
.

[Less]

Haskell Weekly News: June 21, 2009

Posted 15 days ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: June 21, 2009
Welcome to issue 122 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Are you ready for the 12th ... [More] Annual
ICFP programming contest? It begins this Friday, don't miss it!
Let's reclaim Haskell's rightful place as the programming language of
choice for discriminating hackers.

Announcements Haskell
protocol-buffers version 1.5.0. Chris Kuklewicz
announced
version 1.5.0 of the protocol-buffers,
protocol-buffers-descriptor,
and hprotoc
packages to Hackage. This catches up to Google's version 2.1.0: support
for "repeated" fields for primitive types; fields can now be marked
deprecated; the type name resolver will no longer resolve type names to
fields; and more.

12th Annual ICFP Contest. Mark Huntington Snyder
announced
the 12th Annual ICFP Programming
Contest, hosted by the University of Kansas Computer Systems
Design Laboratory at the Information and Telecommunication Technology
Center. The contest will be held on the weekend of June 26-29. The
contest task will be released sixteen seconds after 13:00 Central
Daylight Time (US) on Friday, and entries will be accepted until
13:00:16 CDT on Monday. There is no preregistration required, and
participation is free and open to all. Teams may participate from
any location, and may use any programming language(s). Read the contest blog or subscribe to
the RSS feed
to receive timely updates before and during the contest.

clock 0.1 released. Cetin Sert
announced
the release of clock,
a package for convenient access to high-resolution clock and timer
functions of different operating systems. It is planned to consist of
two layers; the lower layer will provide direct access to OS-specific
clock and timer functions like clock_gettime of Posix or GetTickCount
of Windows, and its upper layer shall then provide a common API for all
supported systems. Currently only the lower level is being developed.

Turbinado V0.7. Alson Kemp
announced
version 0.7 of Turbinado,
a Ruby-On-Rails-like web server and web framework for Haskell. It
is designed to make creating web application using Haskell
both easy and joyful. The primary additions in version 0.7 are
FastCGI support and a new templating system (which includes
HAML and HTML support). Additional details can be found here.

haskeline-class. Antoine Latter
announced
haskeline-class,
a small library providing a newtyped MonadState instance for haskeline
which lifts the class operations to an inner monad (as opposed to its
existing instance).

hyena. Johan Tibell
announced
the first release of hyena,
a library for building web servers, based on the work on iteratee style I/O
by Oleg Kiselyov. The library allows you to create web servers that
consume their input incrementally, without resorting to lazy I/O. This
should lead to more predictable resource usage.

Haskell-based iPhone development. Conal Elliott
announced
a collaboration wiki
page for anyone working with Haskell to make iPhone apps.

Fwd: Boston Haskell June 23rd meeting: openings for Lightning
Talks. Ravi Nanavati
announced
that there are several available slots for "lightning"
(5 minute) talks at the June 23 meeting of the Boston
Area Haskell Users' Group.

haskell-src-exts 1.0.0 rc1. Niklas Broberg
announced
a series of release candidates for haskell-src-exts-1.0.0 (as of this
writing, the most recent release candidate is version 0.5.6). This
version is intended to fully support parsing of almost all Haskell
extensions. Please help with testing!

BostonHaskell: Next meeting - June 23rd at MIT CSAIL Reading Room
(32-G882). Ravi Nanavati
announced
the second meeting of the Boston
Area Haskell Users' Group, scheduled for Tuesday, June 23rd from
6:30pm - 8:30pm. It will be held in the MIT CSAIL Reading Room (32-G882,
i.e. a room on the 8th floor of the Gates Tower of the MIT's Stata Center
at 32 Vassar St in Cambridge, MA). Talks include "Automagic Font Conversion
with Haskell Typeclasses" by Frank Berthold, and "Intermediate Language
Representations via GADTs" by Nirav Dave.

traversal transformations. Sjoerd Visscher
exhibited
some code for Church-encoded container
structures using their Foldable instance, and later announced
the fmlist
package based on the same code, along with a surprising example of a lazy
'middle-infinite' list (where elements can be taken from the beginning
or the end!).

hledger 0.6 released. Simon Michael
announced
the release of hledger 0.6. See the
announcement for a list of the new features and other information.

Discussion Adding swap to Data.Tuple. roconnor
proposed
adding swap and swap' functions to Data.Tuple.

Revamping the module hierarchy. Johan Tibell
began an interesting discussion
about package names, module names, and the module hierarchy.

Confusion on the third monad law when using lambda
abstractions. Jon Strait
asked
about the third monad law, leading to some clarification on what precisely
the law says, and some interesting discussion on idiomatic use of the (<=<)
(Kleisli composition) operator.

Need some help with an infinite list. Gunther Schmidt
asked
for some help generating a particular infinite list, and got a number
of interesting suggestions.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them! Thomas ten Cate: Cosmetics.
Nice-looking icons for EclipseFP!

Niklas Broberg: GSoC
status report, week 4. More release candidates
for haskell-src-exts 1.0.0.

>>> Uwe Hoffmann: publishing
nike runs, part 4: string templates. Real-world
example of using HStringTemplate.

Andy Gill:
Call
for Participation in the 12th Annual ICFP Programming
Contest!. June 26-29!

Sebastian Fischer: Reinventing
Haskell Backtracking.

Remco Niemeijer: Programming
Praxis - Monte Carlo factorization. Remco
implements Pollard's factorization algorithm
in 9 lines of Haskell.

>>> Lee Duhem: Understanding
Functions Which Use 'instance Monad []' by Equational
Reasoning.

Alex McLean: Patterns
in Haskell. A Haskell music
generation EDSL.

David Amos: Group
generators for graph symmetries.

>>> adam: Experience
writing a ray tracer in Haskell. Adam's final project in a Haskell
class taught by Mark Jones and Tim Sheard.

Petr Rockai:
soc
progress 4.

Yaakov Nemoy: Haskell
Bindings to C from Start to Finish. Yaakov outlines his
experience getting c2hs and the FFI to work.

Alex
McLean: Patterns
in Haskell. Representing rhythmic patterns
in Haskell.

>>> Abhishek Tiwari: Haskell
for Bioinformatics.

Roman Cheplyaka: Shootout.
A hilarious comic featuring sound advice on
Haskell optimization.

Ketil Malde: Dephd
updates.

Neil Mitchell: Draft
paper on Derive, comments
wanted.

Remco Niemeijer: Programming
Praxis - Who Owns The
Zebra?.

Erik de Castro Lopo: Two
More for the Debian New Queue..

David Amos: Graph
symmetries.

Alson Kemp: Announce:
Turbinado V0.7.

Gergely Patai: You
can draw your own graphs
now!.

>>> Jens Petersen: Haskell
cabal-install rocks .

Quotes of the Week Botje: <Cheery> oh man. de
bruijn again kicked me to groin <Botje> the easy fix is to label your
groin as (-1) :)
Pseudonym: Telling dons that something has been added to
the shootout is the new telling Oleg that it can't be done in the type
system.
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

To help create new editions of this newsletter, please
see the information on how
to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn
dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/
.

[Less]

Haskell Weekly News: June 13, 2009

Posted 23 days ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: June 13, 2009
Welcome to issue 121 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements purely functional lazy ... [More] non-deterministic
programming. Sebastian Fischer
announced
the explicit-sharing
library, which supports lazy functional-logic programming in Haskell.

nntp 0.0.1. Maciej Piechotka
announced
the release of nntp,
a library to connect to nntp (i.e. mainly USENET) servers.

OpenGLRaw 1.0.0.0. Sven Panne
announced
the release of OpenGLRaw,
a low-level binding for OpenGL. The eventual goal is to make the OpenGL
package easier to install, more modular and a bit more flexible.

pgm-0.1 on Hackage. Frederick Ross
announced
pgm,
a pure Haskell library to read and write PGM images. It seamlessly handles
the divide between 1 and 2 byte per pixel images; reads and writes UArrays;
can handle multiple PGMs concatenated one after another in a file; and
encodes and decodes all comments in the PGM header, which can be used to
drop arbitrary metadata into files in a human readable manner.

iteratee-0.2.1 released. John Lato
announced
the release of iteratee-0.2.1,
a major update to the iteratee library. This library provides types
and functions for performing enumerator/iteratee based I/O operations in
Haskell, as described
by Oleg. The new version is a large redesign, including support for
resumable exceptions and a greatly simplified interface.

testrunner-0.9. Reinier Lamers announced
testrunner, a new
framework for running unit tests. It can run unit tests in parallel;
can run QuickCheck and HUnit tests as well as simple boolean expressions;
and comes with a ready-made main function for your unit test executable.

serial-0.2. Frederick Ross
announced
version 0.2 of serial,
a library for working with line-oriented POSIX serial ports.

hunp-0.0. Deniz Dogan
announced
hunp, a command-line
utility which automagically calls the right "unpacker" program for you
and works on both files and directories.

Nemesis : easy task management. Jinjing Wang
announced
a new release of nemesis,
a simple rake-like task management tool.

Data.Reify.CSE. Sebastiaan Visser
announced
the data-reify-cse
module, which implements common sub-expression elimination for graphs
generated by the Data.Reify package. This package might especially be
useful for optimizing simple compilers for referentially transparent
domain specific languages.

Hac phi accommodation: register by June 15 for reduced rate!
Brent Yorgey
reminded
anyone interested in attending Hac phi that Monday
15 June is the deadline for getting a special reduced hotel rate.

alloy-1.0.0 (generic programming). Neil Brown
announced
the first
release of the Allow generic
programming library. It is intended to be a fairly fast blend of several
other generics approaches, such as SYB (but without the dynamic typing)
and Uniplate (but allowing an arbitrary number of target types), for
performing transformations on specific types in large tree structures.

StrictBench 0.1 - Benchmarking code through strict
evaluation. R.A. Niemeijer
announced
the release of StrictBench,
a library for timing full evaluation of values.

haskeem 0.7.0 uploaded to hackage. Uwe Hollerbach
announced
haskeem,
a small scheme interpreter written in Haskell.

numtype 1.0 -- Type-level (low cardinality) integers. Bjorn
Buckwalter
announced
the Numeric.NumType
module, now released as its own package, which implements a unary
type-level representation of integers, supporting addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division.

Google Summer of Code Progress
updates from participants in the 2008 Google
Summer of Code.

space profiling. Gergely Patai
has some pretty
graphs generated by his profiling library.

haskell-src-exts. Niklas Broberg
is quite
close to releasing haskell-src-exts 1.0.0, as soon
as he has full and correct support for (almost) everything
code-related, with only a few things left to do. He also wrote
a
post explaining the intricacies of parsing code containing the 'forall'
keyword (well, whether it is a keyword depends on which extensions are
enabled...)

fast darcs. Petr Rockai
made a bit less progress this week, with
finals and other things interfering, but made some
progress on some documentation, tracking down a performance regression,
and other things.

Discussion Adding an ignore function to
Control.Monad. Gwern Branwen
proposed
adding an 'ignore' function to Control.Monad which explicitly changes an
m a into a m (). Bikeshedding (and some useful discussion) ensued.

Wiki user accounts. Philippa Cowderoy
began a discussion
of what to do about the current situation with wiki user accounts (namely,
that account creation is disabled due to spam, and the one maintainer of
the wiki can't always respond to account creation requests instantly).

Lightweight type-level dependent programming in Haskell. Ryan
Ingram
made an interesting post
about implementing lightweight closed type classes in Haskell.

who's up for a hackathon? (ICFP, late Aug, early Sept). Eric Kow
wanted
to know who would be interested in having a hackathon immediately
before or after ICFP in Edinburgh.

Jobs Galois is hiring functional programmers. Don Stewart
announced
that Galois is hiring! See the
announcement for more details.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them! Niklas Broberg: GSoC
status report, week 3.

Joachim Breitner: Introducing
L-seed.

Conal Elliott: Memoizing
polymorphic functions - part
two.

London Haskell Users Group: Next
Meeting: Sean Leather, Fun and generic things to
do with EMGM.

David Amos: It's
on Hackage!. Haskell for Maths is now just
a cabal-install away.

Michael Snoyman: Filename
encoding issues.

David Amos: Permutation
groups.

Edward Kmett: Recursion
Schemes: A Field Guide (Redux).

mightybyte: Intro
to HAppS-State.

Conal Elliott: Memoizing
polymorphic functions - part
one.

Lennart Augustsson: More
LLVM.

Roman Cheplyaka: Don't
play with your monads.

Galois, Inc: Tech
Talk: Orc in Haskell.

Petr Rockai: soc progress
3. Progress on Petr's GSoC darcs project.

Magnus
Therning: Using
msmtp with darcs.

Erik de Castro Lopo: Debian
Maintainer. Erik is now a Debian
maintainer, and plans to give Haskell on Debian a
much-needed facelift!

Niklas Broberg: What's
in a forall?. More Haskell
parsing fun.

Well-Typed.Com: GHC,
primops and exorcising GMP.

Niklas Broberg: What's
in a forall?. More than
you might expect!

>>> Zsol: Visualizing
the graphrewrite process behind Haskell. Work on the visual-graphrewrite
package.

Eric Kow (kowey): testrunner
for practical quickcheck.

Sebastian Fischer: Explicit
sharing of monadic effects. Purely functional, lazy,
non-deterministic programming!

LHC Team: New
backend.

>>> James McNeill: Messing
with Haskell.

Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Hashing
Molecules.

Shin-Cheng Mu: Longest
Segment Satisfying Suffix and Overlap-Closed
Predicates.

David Amos: Simple
graphs with Math.Combinatorics.Graph. David shows off
his Haskell for Maths library.

Gergely Patai: More
colourful graphs. Graphs from Gergely's GSoC
project on profiling.

Bryan O'Sullivan: Case
conversion and text 0.3. The text module gets solid,
standards-compliant case conversion.

Bjorn Buckwalter: numtype
1.0: Type-level (low cardinality) integers.

>>>
Jörn Dinkla: Parallelization
with Haskell - Easy as can be.

Quotes of the Week sjanssen: in our sub-culture,
"considered harmful" means "burn it with fire"
quicksilver: after all, anyone who insists on talking
about himself in the third person is clearly someone to be reckoned
with.
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

To help create new editions of this newsletter, please
see the information on how
to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn
dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/
.

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Haskell Weekly News: June 6, 2009

Posted about 1 month ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: June 06, 2009
Welcome to issue 120 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Sorry for the massive HWN, I missed last ... [More] week so
you're getting two for the price of one! Registration for Hac phi is now open, be
sure to register soon (register by June 15 to get a special hotel rate).

Announcements Reminder: Haskell Implementers' Workshop CFT
deadline in 2 weeks. Simon Marlow
reminded
everyone to consider submitting a talk proposal for the Haskell
Implementers' Workshop, to be held in conjunction with ICFP in Edinburgh,
Scotland on 5 September. The deadline for submissions is a couple of
weeks away (15 June); all that is needed is an abstract.

storable-record. Henning Thielemann
announced
storable-record,
a small package for simplified declaration of Storable
instances for records. It may be used as an alternative to the
c2hs
preprocessor. It was made possible by advanced applicative technology,
a cutting edge LCM monoid and an incredible constructor power tower.

Haskell Communities and Activities Report (16th ed., May
2009). Janis Voigtlaender
announced
the availability of the 16th
Haskell Communities and Activities Report.

hledger 0.5 released. Simon Michael
announced
the release of version 0.5 of hledger,
a (mostly) text-mode double-entry accounting tool that generates precise
activity and balance reports from a plain text journal file.

New repository and trac for haskell-src-exts. Niklas Broberg
announced
some new infrastructure for the haskell-src-exts package,
set up in preparation for his GSoC project. with the
HSP packages, it's now old enough to be allowed to live on its own. There
is also a bug
tracker. Please help by reporting any bugs you come across, or by
requesting new and cool features.

bsd-sysctl 1.0.3. Maxime Henrion
announced
the release of bsd-sysctl
1.0.3, a package that provides a System.BSD.Sysctl module allowing
access to the C sysctl(3) API. It should fully work on FreeBSD, NetBSD
and Mac OS X platforms.

multirec-binary. Sebastiaan Visser
announced
the release of multirec-binary,
which allows generic derivation of Data.Binary instances using the MultiRec
library.

notice for package authors. Duncan Coutts
announced
that Hackage uploads will soon require an upper bound on the version of
the base package and reject packages that omit it. This will hopefully
result in less breakage the next time a new version of the base package
is released.

(Pre-) Announce: Data.GDS 0.1.0. Uwe Hollerbach
(pre-)
announced Data.GDS, a small module to write and (eventually) read
GDS files, a classic format of the semiconductor industry. The module
can currently generate GDS files with a fairly low-level interface;
planned future versions (which will be uploaded to Hackage) will have a
higher-level interface and be able to parse GDS files as well.

new version of uu-parsinglib. S. Doaitse Swierstra
announced
that a new version of the uu-parsinglib
library has been uploaded to hackage. It is now based on Control.Applicative
where possible. Be warned that functions like some and many will be
redefined in the future.

Hac phi: Haskell hackathon in Philadelphia, July 24-26. Brent
Yorgey
announced
Hac phi, a Haskell hackathon/get-together to be held July 24-26 at the
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The hackathon will officially
kick off at 2:30 Friday afternoon, and go until 5pm on Sunday (with
breaks for sleep, of course). Everyone is welcome---you do not have to be
a Haskell guru to attend! Helping hack on someone else's project could be
a great way to increase your Haskell-fu. If you plan on coming, please register.
There is a block of hotel rooms available at a special rate only
until June 15, so register early! More details can be found on the Hac phi wiki.

Job for someone: make a VM image for GHC development. Simon Marlow
suggested
a useful project for someone looking for something to do: create a VM
image of a Linux system with a complete GHC development environment set
up and ready to go.

My attempt at Haskell USB. Mauricio
announced
some Haskell
bindings to libusb, and gave another plug for his bindings-common
package, which makes it easier to generate Haskell bindings to low-level
libraries.

second alpha release of OSX haskell platform installer. Gregory
Collins
announced
a second
candidate release for the OSX Haskell Platform installer. Please try
it out!

Release Schedule for 2009.2.0.2. Don Stewart
announced
the release
schedule for the next minor release of the 2009.2.0 branch of the
Haskell Platform. The freeze for package changes will be Wednesday 1 July,
and the release is scheduled for Monday 13th July.

hscamwire, for IIDC1394 cameras. Frederick Ross
announced
the release of hscamwire
0.1, which provides a nice Haskellized layer over Camwire, a library
to connect to IIDC1394 cameras (most scientific and industrial Firewire
cameras) on Linux.

Safe and generic printf with C-like format string. oleg
announced
some code to implement a type-safe polyvariadic version of printf, which
is also integrated with Show so that any showable type can be printed.

A library for serial ports. Frederick Ross
announced
the release of serial-0.1,
a library for line-oriented interaction with serial ports on POSIX
compatible systems.

HaL4: Haskell-Meeting in Germany, 12th June 2009. Janis
Voigtlaender
reminded
everyone of Hal4, a German-language
Haskell gathering to be held in Halle/Saale on June 12. There are already
close to 50 registered participants, so expect a very lively meeting! Late
registration still possible.

wp-archivebot 0.1 - archive Wikipedia's external links in
WebCite. Gwern Branwen
announced
wp-archivebot,
a relatively simple little script which follows all the links in a RSS
feed, combs the destination for http:// links, and submits them to WebCite.

memscript-0.0.0.2. Ki Yung Ahn
announced
memscript,
a command line utility for memorizing scriptures or any other text.

HSH 2.0.0. John Goerzen
announced
the release of version
2.0.0 of HSH, the Haskell shell scripting library. This version features
a complete rewrite of the core using System.Process, a drastic reduction
in code size and complexity, cross-platform support, and a simpler and
more flexible API.

atom-0.0.5. Tom Hawkins
announced
version 0.5 of the atom
library, a DSL for embedded hard realtime applications. This version
includes a few bug fixes and doc improvements.

heap-1.0.0. Stephan Friedrichs
announced
a rewrite of the heap package, heap-1.0.0.
It is not 100% compatible with version 0.6.0, but provides major
improvements, including a better mechanism for instantiating min-,
max-, min-prio- and max-prio-heaps, and faster {from,to}{Asc,Desc}List
conversions.

The Haskell Platform 2009.2.0.1. Don Stewart
announced
the second release (2009.2.0.1) of the Haskell Platform, a
single, standard Haskell distribution for everyone. The specification,
along with installers (including Windows and Unix installers for a full
Haskell environment) are available.

Anglohaskell 2009. Philippa Cowderoy
announced
Anglohaskell
2009, to be held at MSR Cambridge on the 7th and 8th of August.

code reviewers wanted for hashed-storage (darcs). Eric Kow
solicited
anyone with a few spare hours this summer willing to help the Darcs project
as a code reviewer for the standalone hashed-storage module, which will
be used by Darcs in the future. No Darcs experience is needed!

Google Summer of Code Progress
updates from participants in the 2008 Google
Summer of Code.

Haddock improvements. Isaac Dupree
has begun looking at the Haddock code, and has a question
about which of two options he should pursue.

EclipseFP. Thomas Ten Cate
has posted an explanation
of how the Scion client/server model works.

Space profiling. Gergely Patai
has uploaded
a preliminary version of the hp2any core library which
handles heap profiles both during and after execution. He has also posted
some pretty graphs generated by a simple utility built on top of the
core library.

haskell-src-exts. Niklas Broberg
has begun work by making a list
of all language extensions and the ways in which they affect lexing
and parsing, since haskell-src-exts will need to be parameterized over
these extensions.

Fast Darcs. Petr Rockai
has posted two detailed progress reports
already, with many changes to both the standalone hashed-storage library
and a fork of darcs
which uses it.

Discussion Error message reform (was: Strange type error
with associated type synonyms). Max Rabkin
began an interesting discussion
about error messages. Do you have an intuitive sense of which is the
'expected' and which the 'inferred' type?

time library dependencies. Ashley Yakeley
asked
what dependencies are acceptable for the time library, leading to a
discussion of what dependencies are acceptable for base packages.

Bool as type class to serve EDSLs. Sebastiaan Visser
started a discussion
on the possibility of a type class for representing Boolean values,
much like the current Num class for numeric values.

Jobs 10 jobs in declarative programming. Oege de Moor
announced
the availability of positions with Semmle and LogicBlox for ten declarative
programming consultants, who will work with clients to write custom queries
in Datalog, and to create user interfaces in a declarative framework. Semmle
and LogicBlox are creating a platform for declarative programming in
Datalog, a pure logic programming language. Semmle is based in Oxford,
headed by Oege de Moor; LogicBlox is based in Atlanta, headed by Molham
Aref. See the announcement for more information and how to apply.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are
marked with >>>, be sure to welcome them! David Amos: Welcome
to Haskell for Maths. David's Haskell library for mathematics
exploration is under development again!

Joachim Breitner: Third
place in AI programming
contest.

Bryan O'Sullivan: Dealing
with encoding errors in
Data.Text.

Remco Niemeijer: Programming
Praxis - Ternary Search Tries.

beelsebob: Collecting
Non-Memory Resources.

Luke Palmer: It
is never safe to cheat. Ceiling cat
is watching you.

Alex McLean: More hackery. More
cool livecoding with Haskell.

Thomas ten Cate: Client/server
communication.

Gergely Patai: The
first graphs.

Alson Kemp: Turbinado
V0.6.5.

Don Stewart (dons): The
Haskell Platform 2009.2.0.1. The first minor update release
of the Haskell Platform is here.

Alson Kemp: Turbinado
V0.6.5.

Michael Snoyman: Functors
and Monads (containers).

Well-Typed.Com: Come
talk at the Haskell Implementers'
Workshop!.

GSoC Fast Darcs: soc
progress 2.

Shin-Cheng Mu: On
a Basic Property for the Longest Prefix
Problem.

>>> Ben Hutchison: OO/Imperative
programmers: 'Study Functional Programming or Be
Ignorant'.

Michael Snoyman: Run
a MonadCGI as a CGI
application!.

Michael Snoyman: Wordify:
RESTful Haskell web apps.

Marco Tulio Gontijo e
Silva: xmlGetWidget
without castTo*.

>>> slawekk: Probability
monad.

Brandon Simmons: Huffman
Coding.

Niklas Broberg: Parametrising
haskell-src-exts on extensions. A list of language extensions
and how they affect parsing.

Manuel M T Chakravarty: Instant Generics now
has a website!.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: The
CAS experiment.

Brent Yorgey: Hac
phi!. Registration is now open.

Jeff Heard: Buster
2.2 - Application Orchestration redux. Example
code showing off Buster.

Bryan O'Sullivan: I
put a pidgit in your widget so you can fidget
while you calculate pi. GHC and the
language shootout.

Niklas Broberg: Haskell
Platform, I'm in love.

Bjorn Buckwalter: Benchmarking
Amazon EC2 with GHC.

Bjorn Buckwalter: Blogging
with Pandoc, literate Haskell, and a
bug.

>>> Chris Moos: Haskell
AIM Client - a cool proof of concept.

Marco Tulio Gontijo e Silva: Generating code with
Haskell-src and TH.

Quotes of the Week pumpkin: we should throw it
[CReal] in with Foreign.C.Types to confuse people
MyCatVerbs: The *real* best way to optimize a
program is to tell dons that it's been added to the Shootout.
SimonFrankau: The points-free approach, while elegant,
can make code unreadable, especially if it is written by quantitative
analysts moonlighting as functional programmers. ValarQ:
l33t_h4x0r: could you help me port GHC to the AVR architecture? <--
l33t_h4x0r has left #haskell gwern: drat. what *do*
all you people talk about? only one bacon and one zombie quote
quicksilver: well if you can get proggit to help with your
interview, then perhaps you can get proggit to help with the job when
you get it. So it's not cheating, it's just an indication of one of your
skill sets. shapr: I haven't tried F#, everytime I
get the urge to do something fun with .NET I have SharePoint flashbacks
and buy more hardware instead. gwern: bleh. haskell
is messing me up. I wondered what operator =) is, before I realized it
was a syntax error, before I realized it was an emoticon
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

To help create new editions of this newsletter, please
see the information on how
to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn
dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/
.

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