General News

Welcome to issue 90 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

One day a Haskell n00b asked the master coder, "Master, does (const 3 undefined) have the terminating nature, or not?" The master replied, "Of course." Cried the n00b, "But that changes everything! Why did you not tell me this before?" "You never asked." Immediately, the n00b was enlightened.

Announcements

Darcs hacking sprint. Eric Kow announced that the darcs hacking sprint is taking place this weekend!

Lambdabot 4.2.2. Gwern Branwen announced the release of version 4.2.2 of lambdabot, the famous Haskell IRC bot. The new release has innumerable new features and bugfixes, trained suckling pigs, mermaids, etc.

Autoproc Change of Maintainer (if you use procmail you should read this). Jason Dagit announced that Gwern Branwen will be taking over the autoproc project. Autoproc makes it quick and easy for Haskell programmers to make procmail recipes by using an embedded domain specific language. Once your recipes type check and compile, you simply run autoproc and it generates the corresponding procmail recipe.

External Sort: Sort a 10-million integer file with just 256M of ram.. Thomas Hartman announced the external-sort package. It implements an on-disk external sort algorithm in Haskell, which you can use to sort lists that will not fit in memory.

IEEE-utils. Sterling Clover announced the IEEE-utils package, providing a number of bindings for anyone interested in doing hardcore floating-point programming.

rewriting-0.1. Thomas van Noort announced the release of rewriting, a generic rewriting library for regular datatypes. Features include generic rewriting machinery, generic traversals, and rewrite rules defined as values instead of functions.

REMINDER: Haskell Communities and Activities Report. Janis Voigtlaender reminded everyone that the deadline for the November 2008 edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report (Friday, October 31) is approaching fast! If you haven't already, please write an entry for your new project, or update your old entry. For more information, see the original call for contributions.

lhs2tex-1.14. Andres Loeh announced the release of lhs2TeX version 1.14, a a preprocessor to generate LaTeX code from literate Haskell sources.

colour 0.0.0. roconnor announced an initial release of the colour package. It is hoped that this library will become the standard colour library for Haskell.

Discussion

Hackage Improvement Ideas. Jason Dagit suggested some improvements to Hackage and asked for others to contribute their ideas as well.

Spine-lazy "multiqueue". Luke Palmer asked for help implementing an efficient spine-lazy multiqueue.

Jobs

Functional programming job opening. Simon Peyton-Jones announced a job opening in functional programming at Microsoft. They are looking for "an experienced software development engineer who has mastered C/C++ and/or C# development and is now learning or is already an expert using F# (or Haskell)."

Blog noise

• Eric Kow (kowey): darcs hacking sprints - some pictures from Team Brighton.

• Jason Dagit: Understanding Darcs Commute.

• Ketil Malde: Optimization again: befuddled by bytestrings.

• Creighton Hogg: Revisiting old concepts.

• Tupil: On unit testing and type checking.

• Eric Kow (kowey): darcs weekly news #9.

• >>> Alberto Corona: Axioms and properties for haskell classes. Alberto demonstrates some code for adding checkable algebraic properties to type classes.

• Creighton Hogg: A serious problem. Creighton with some straight talk about typeclass abuse.

• London Haskell Users Group: Next meeting: Duncan Coutts on the Haskell Platform.

• Manuel M T Chakravarty: Keep those cores busy!. A comprehensive account of the full vectorisation transformation underlying the implementation of nested data parallelism in GHC.

• Conal Elliott: Simpler, more efficient, functional linear maps.

• Conal Elliott: Vector space bases via type families.

• >>> Sebastian Fischer: Constrained Monadic Computations.

• Luke Palmer: I know what I'm going to get for christmas. "I believe I have found a truly marvelous implementation of FRP which this blog post is too short to contain."

• >>> codeflow: On Haskell and C++.

• >>> Simon Dobson: Why Haskell will take over the world. Simon has some thoughts on functional programming and the future of programming languages.

• >>> Falko: Learning Haskell's Basics - Problems from Project Euler.

Quotes of the Week

• vixey: debugging code is admitting defeat
• kaomoji: [on #haskell] man, you guys are really nerdy
• sclv: I guess I'd believe the universe was lazy if the hubble looked at that stuff way at the edge of the big bang diaspora and when we magnified the picture we saw "stack overflow"
• rwbarton: relational calculus? "DIFFERENTIATE TABLE users WITH RESPECT TO name"
• heatsink: ban :: (BanContext no, UserIdentifer u) => u -> no u
• rwbarton: I tried typechecking the value of unwords (replicate 125 "fmap") in ghci once, and it consumed all my memory
• ghc: Step 3: Zonk the kinds

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/ .

Welcome to issue 89 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements

New Haskell tutorial. Miran Lipovaca (BONUS) has written a new and most excellent Haskell tutorial, "Learn You a Haskell For Great Good!".

Glob 0.1, globbing library. Matti Niemenmaa announced the release of Glob 0.1, a small library for glob-matching purposes based on a subset of zsh's syntax.

hledger 0.1, command-line accounting tool. Simon Michael announced the first release of hledger, a command-line accounting tool similar to John Wiegley's c++ ledger. hledger generates simple ledger-compatible transaction and account balance reports from a plain text ledger file.

[ANN] Haskell Cheatsheet v1.0. Justin Bailey announced a "cheat sheet" for Haskell, a PDF that tries to summarize Haskell 98's syntax, keywords and other language elements.

Salsa: A .NET Bridge for Haskell. Andrew Appleyard announced the first release of Salsa, an experimental Haskell library that allows Haskell programs to access .NET libraries. Salsa operates by loading the .NET runtime into your Haskell process and using the FFI (and run-time code generation) to marshall calls between the .NET and Haskell runtimes. It includes a code generator and a type-level library (which uses type families) to provide type-safe access to .NET libraries in Haskell with C#-style method overload resolution and implicit conversions.

maccatcher-1.0.0. Jason Dusek announced the maccatcher package, which obtains a MAC address on *NIX and Windows.

Call for Contributions - Haskell Communities and Activities Report, November 2008 edition. Janis Voigtlaender sent out call for contributions to the 15th edition of the Haskell Communities & Activities Report. The submission deadline is 31 October 2008. If you are working on any project that is in some way related to Haskell, please write a short entry and submit it. Even if the project is very small or unfinished or you think it is not important enough -- please reconsider and submit an entry anyway!

Data.IVar 0.1. Luke Palmer announced the release of the Data.IVar module, which provides write-once variables that can be blocked on in parallel. Unlike other implementations, Data.IVar does not use thread racing, since empirical tests have shown that the GHC scheduler is not quite good enough to handle thread-racing efficiently.

A wiki page for managing the 6.10 handover. Don Stewart announced a wiki page to help with the transition to GHC 6.10. It collects the 7 or so known issues that break code with GHC 6.10. Please feel free to clean up, and especially add techniques for handling each change.

GHC 6.10.1 RC 1. Ian Lynagh announced GHC 6.10.0.20081007, the first release candidate for GHC 6.10.1. There is also a status page for GHC 6.10.1.

Graphalyze-0.4 and SourceGraph-0.2. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic announced the release of version 0.4 of the Graphalyze library and version 0.2 of the SourceGraph programme. SourceGraph is a programme designed to help you analyse the static complexity of your Haskell code when represented as a graph. These releases fix the bugs reported by Gwern Branwen, Magnus Therning, and Christopher Hinson.

ListZipper-1.1.0.0. Ryan Ingram announced the release of a simple list zipper library to Hackage, ListZipper-1.1.0.0.

darcs 2.1.0. Eric Kow announced the release of darcs 2.1.0. This version provides over 20 bug fixes and 7 new features since darcs 2.0.2. Most notably, the darcs-2 repository format is now the default, there is better HTTP support, and a longstanding 'pending patch' regression has been fixed.

Yi 0.5.0.1. Jean-Phillipe Bernardy announced the 0.5 release of Yi, a text editor written and extensible in Haskell. The long-term goal of the Yi project is to provide the editor of choice for Haskell programmers.

Discussion

OT: Haskell desktop wallpaper?. Magnus Therning asked for Haskell-themed desktop wallpapers, and the community responded with quite a few nice images.

Abusing quickcheck to check existential properties. Norman Ramsey asked about using QuickCheck to check existential properties; suggestions involved SmallCheck and skolemization.

Repair to floating point enumerations?. Malcolm Wallace began a discussion on the merits of changing the (admittedly wonky) H98 semantics for the Enum instances of Float and Double in Haskell Prime.

A general question about the use of classes in defining interfaces. S. Doaitse Swierstra asked about the feasibility of including top-level functions implemented using Applicative combinators as class methods with default implementations, to allow for the possibility of giving them more efficient implementations in specific instances.

Proposal #2659: Add sortOn and friends to Data.List. Twan van Laarhoven proposed adding sortOn (:: Ord b => (a -> b) -> [a] -> [a]) and related functions to Data.List.

Blog noise

• Andy Gill: Pretty Printing Code with Markup. writes about a new version of the HughesPJ pretty printing library which allows for pretty-printing with markup.

• "FP Lunch": Is purity inefficient?. Are idiomatic pure functional programs less efficient than idiomatic impure ones?

• Eric Kow (kowey): darcs weekly news #8.

• Conal Elliott: Composing memo tries.

• Conal Elliott: Elegant memoization with functional memo tries.

• >>> Paolo Capriotti: Monads for Markov chains.

• Real-World Haskell: Production status update: we’re in QC1.

• Joachim Breitner: Infinite loops in Haskell.

• Luke Palmer: FRP Rant.

• Luke Palmer: data-memocombinators.

• Bryan O'Sullivan: Using Bloom filters for large scale gene sequence analysis in Haskell. Bryan and Ketil Malde's paper was accepted to PADL 09!

• Arnar Birgisson: Generating legal subsets of a dependency graph.

• Creighton Hogg: A silly example and a brief history.

• >>> Robert Ottaway: Sorting using Haskell.

• Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Untangling with Continued Fractions: part 5.

• Holumbus: Source Links Are Back!.

• London Haskell Users Group: Getting things going again.

• >>> Justin Bailey: The Haskell Cheatsheet.

• >>> Nathan Sanders: Type-directed programming.

• >>> Micah Cowan: Adventures in Haskell, Part 2: Kewlness.

• Manuel M T Chakravarty: GpuGen: Bringing the Power of GPUs to Haskell..

• >>> Binu Raghavan: Haskell.... Binu is trying to learn Haskell.

• Bjoern Edstroem: Let's build an MP3-decoder!.

Quotes of the Week

• mckinna: you don't need to produce elements of an *arbitrary* whatever-it-is when you can produce elements of the *initial* whatever-it-is
• tristes_tigres: thinks that programming languages can be divided into two broad classes: functional and dysfunctional
• luqui: Down with the IO bourgeoisie! Long live the purely functional proletariat
• ystael: it seems like every time i switch channels over to #haskell someone is talking about launching missiles. one might be inclined to draw freudian conclusions.

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/ .

Welcome to issue 88 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

An extra-short HWN this week, so you get an extra ten minutes to do something else during the time you would have normally spent reading the HWN! HWN-editor-approved activities for your ten minutes include eating cookies, playing Fantastic Contraption, and writing a type checker in the type system while eating cookies.

Announcements

Arch Haskell News: Oct 4 2008. Don Stewart sent out the newest Arch Haskell news --- now with 609 Haskell packages!

Announcing OneTuple-0.1.0. John Dorsey announced the release of the ground-breaking OneTuple library, which adds the long neglected one-tuple to Haskell. It also turns out that the denizens of Haskell-cafe are completely unable to refrain from turning jokes into long-winded technical discussions about strictness and lifted types.

Haskell protocol-buffers version 0.3.1. Chris Kuklewicz announced the release of protocol-buffers 0.3.1, with some functionality also split off into protocol-buffers-descriptor and hprotoc. The 'hprotoc' compiler for proto files to Haskell source code now takes a "-u" command-line option. When given, this turns on code generation to support loading, storing, and saving unknown fields.

Discussion

Stacking monads. Andrew Coppin began a long discussion on monads, monad transformers, Applicative, MonadPlus, and related topics.

planning for ghc-6.10.1 and hackage. Duncan Coutts began a discussion on how to make the transition to GHC 6.10 as painless as possible, especially as it relates to the new base-4 package and Cabal.

Proposal #2629: Data.List: Replace nub; add nubOrd, nubInt, nubWith. Bart Massey proposed refactoring nub into a 'nubWith' function which can be specialized to efficient versions for Int and Ord.

Blog noise

• Luke Palmer: Laziness and the monad laws. Luke explains why making a Functor or Monad instance too lazy can be just as bad as making it too strict.

• Paul R Brown: The Haskell Platform and Lessons Learned Elsewhere.

• Eric Kow (kowey): darcs weekly news #6.

• Mads Lindstroem: Overlapping Instances in Haskell.

• >>> Bill Six: Dabbling with Haskell. Bill explores palindromic pangrams using Haskell.

Quotes of the Week

• ozy`: [on RWH] most authors are like "FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS FUNCTIONAL!!!" whereas these guys are more like "yeah but practical programming is practical. map wash_dish dishes"
• BMeph: * wants an "Everything I know about computing I learned from sigfpe" T-shirt
• OlegFacts: Oleg can evaluate bottom. With his fists.
• quicksilver: my computer starts to play 'Dies Irae' when shapr gets ops, automatically.

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/ .

Welcome to issue 87 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

ICFP was held last week in Victoria, and by all accounts was a great success! This edition of the HWN includes much ICFP and Haskell Symposium-related content, including videos of the Haskell symposium presentations, programming contest results, some notes on the future of Haskell, and slides from a Haskell tutorial and a talk about the Haskell Platform. But ICFP didn't seem to slow down the community all that much: you'll find the usual mix of newly released and updated packages, blog posts, mailing list discussions, and silly quotes as well.

Announcements

Haskell-Embedded System Design: ForSyDe 3.0 and Tutorial. Alfonso Acosta announced the 3.0 release of ForSyDe. The ForSyDe (Formal System Design) methodology has been developed with the objective to move system design (e.g. System on Chip, Hardware and Software systems) to a higher level of abstraction. ForSyDe is implemented as a Haskell-embedded behavioral DSL (Domain Specific Language). The 3.0 release includes a new deep-embedded DSL and embedded compiler, as well as a new user-friendly tutorial.

Graphalyze-0.1. Ivan Miljenovic announced the initial release of his graph-theoretic analysis library, Graphalyze. This is a pre-release of the library he is writing for his mathematics honours thesis, "Graph-Theoretic Analysis of the Relationships in Discrete Data".

Symposium videos. Malcolm Wallace announced guerrilla videos of the Haskell Symposium 2008 presentations.

ICFP programming contest results. Malcolm Wallace sent a link to a video of the ICFP programming contest results presentation.

Version 0.4.3 of happs-tutorial is a HAppS job board, done in HAppS.. Thomas Hartman announced version 4 of the self-demoing HAppS tutorial, a HAppS job board.

TH code for deriving Binary and NFData instances. Tim Newsham announced some Template Haskell code for automatically deriving Data.Binary and Control.Parallel.Strategies.NFData instances.

Notes on the future of Haskell from ICFP. Bryan O'Sullivan posted a writeup from the ICFP conference floor on the future of Haskell and functional programming.

datapacker 1.0.1. John Goerzen announced the release of datapacker 1.0.1.

A Functional Implementation of the Garsia-Wachs Algorithm. Nicolas Pouillard announced a Haskell implementation of an algorithm that builds a binary tree with minimum weighted path length from weighted leaf nodes given in symmetric order. This can be used to build optimum search tables, to balance a 'ropes' data structure in an optimal way.

graphviz-2008.9.20. Ivan Miljenovic announced a new version of Matthew Sackman's Haskell bindings to Graphviz. See Ivan's original announcement for information on what new features are included, and what the difference is among the various graphviz-related packages on Hackage.

darcs 2.1.0pre2. Eric Kow announced the release of darcs 2.1.0pre2, formerly known as 2.0.3. See Eric's announcement for a list of new features and bug fixes in this release.

protocol-buffers-0.2.9 for Haskell is ready. ChrisK announced the release of the protocol-buffers package, which generates Haskell data types that can be converted back and forth to lazy ByteStrings that interoperate with Google's generated code in C++/Java/python.

panda blog engine. Jinjing Wang announced the release of panda, a simple blog engine written in Haskell.

OpenSPARC project applicant chosen. Duncan Coutts announced that Ben Lippmeier has been chosen for the OpenSPARC project. Ben will spend three months hacking on GHC to make it perform well on the latest multi-core OpenSPARC chips.

Hugs on the iPhone. Alberto Galdo announced that he has gotten Hugs to run on the iPhone, and has made packages available for others who would like to install it as well.

Discussion

Shooting yourself in the foot in Haskell. John Van Enk asked how to shoot yourself in the foot with Haskell, with humorous results.

Total Functional Programming in Haskell. Jason Dagit started a discussion on total functional programming, Haskell, abstraction boundaries and the IO monad, and related topics.

Health effects. Andrew Coppin told a story about a chocolate bar and recursion, which led to a discussion of optimization problems, Dedekind cuts, some meta-discussion of the discussion, and entirely too many puns.

The container problem. Andrew Coppin asked about the possibility if abstracting over various sorts of containers in Haskell, and why there isn't a widely used library that does this. A discussion of various container libraries and the language issues that arise followed.

Red-Blue Stack. Matthew Eastman asked how to implement a certain data structure (red-blue stacks) in Haskell. Several people responded with increasingly clever solutions, and a comparison of mutating vs. non-mutating algorithms.

Climbing up the shootout.... Don Stewart began a long and ongoing discussion about improving Haskell's performance on benchmarks in the Shootout, now that there is a quad core machine for running benchmarks!

Line noise. Andrew Coppin started an interesting discussion about perceptions of Haskell syntax by programmers who aren't familiar with it.

Jobs

London FP job in asset management. Michael Bott announced an opportunity for two functional programmers based in London, with a software house specialising in asset management.

Blog noise

• Creighton Hogg: Some first steps with Data.Reactive. Creighton gives some simple examples of using Conal Elliott's Reactive library. More to come!

• Bryan O'Sullivan: Unix hacking in Haskell: better pseudoterminal support.

• Creighton Hogg: One last thought on laziness. In Creighton's opinion, laziness is the single hardest thing to get used to in Haskell. If you're learning Haskell, don't despair, break out the pencil and paper!

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Animal as RDR, part III.

• Neil Mitchell: General Updates.

• Don Stewart (dons): Newest Mersenne Prime. Haskell doesn't even break a sweat computing the largest known prime number.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Animal as RDR, part II.

• Bryan O'Sullivan: Using Bloom filters for large scale gene sequence analysis in Haskell. A paper that Bryan and Ketil Malde submitted to PADL 09. "The Cliff's Notes version: Bloom filters are almost unused in bioinformatics; they're tremendously useful; and our Haskell code is really fast.

• >>> Zubin Wadia: Simon Peyton Jones & Microsoft Research Cambridge. Zubin thinks quite highly of SPJ and MSR Cambridge.

• Bryan O'Sullivan: Slides from my DEFUN 2008 Haskell tutorial.

• Mads Lindstroem: Inheritance in Composites and Overlapping Instances.

• >>> Micah Cowan: Adventures in Haskell. Micah shares some thoughts on learning Haskell.

• Bryan O'Sullivan: Some notes on the future of Haskell and FP.

• Well-Typed.Com: Slides from the Haskell Platform talk.

• Paul Johnson: Why the banks collapsed, and how a paper on Haskell programming can help stop it happening next time.

• >>> Nathan Sanders: Two weeks of Haskell. Nathan shares some thoughts on his first two weeks learning Haskell.

• Bryan O'Sullivan: Twittering from ICFP / Haskell symposium / CUFP.

• Real-World Haskell: Slides from ACCU talk.

• Eric Kow (kowey): darcs weekly news #5.

• John Goerzen (CosmicRay): New version of datapacker.

• >>> James Cowie: Haskell, the verdict!. James is impressed with Haskell after using it for a few weeks.

• >>> Alex Combas: What's all this fuss about Haskell?. Alex is thinking of learning Haskell in his spare time.

• Aaron Tomb: Parsing the Linux kernel with Haskell: experience with Language.C. Aaron is impressed by the new Language.C libraries, which parses all 18 million pre-processed lines of Linux kernel source with no problems!

Quotes of the Week

• Fuse_: Oh, sorry for hijacking mathematical purity with dirty fiscal dynamical systems. :o
• mauke: <mauke> data Mushroom badger = Mushroom badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger <leimy> where's the snake <mauke> deriving Snake
• ddarius: higher order of lambdabot deployment and management engineers or HOLDME
• Botje: #haskell: parallellising your homework answers!
• olsner: most everything gives nicer everything than perl
• Botje: fuzzy feelings aren't always aerodynamic, unfortunately.
• chrisdone: benchmarks only exist to make fun of ruby
• Claus Reinke: [on breaking code up into smaller bits] Once your readers understand your code, you can add the one-liner and ask for applause.
• Jake Mcarthur: A fold by any other name would smell as sweet.
• lispy: Schroedinger's cat is really in a thunk not a box
• Bulat: Haskell was developed with goal to hide implementation details from egg-headed scientists and this obviously should have some drawbacks

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/ .

Welcome to issue 86 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

Lots of NEW stuff this week! A new generics library, new versions of Pandoc and darcs, a new website for xmonad, a new GADT/type family inference engine for GHC, a Haskell binding for Qt, and some new, astonishingly elegant ideas from Oleg. Also, here's hoping that everyone has a lot of fun at ICFP!

Announcements

GHC version control. Simon Peyton-Jones sent out a revised proposal for GHC version control.

darcs 2.0.3pre1. Eric Kow announced the first pre-release of darcs 2.0.3, featuring a few major bug fixes and a handful of interesting features.

EMGM. Sean Leather announced a release of Extensible and Modular Generics for the Masses (EMGM), a library for generic programming in Haskell using type classes.

Pandoc 1.0.0.1. John MacFarlane announced the release of pandoc 1.0.0.1, the swiss army knife of text markup formats.

Iteratee-based IO. oleg described a safe, declarative approach to input processing which will be the subject of a talk at DEFUN08 on September 27.

MetaHDBC paper. Mads Lindstroem announced a draft version of a paper about the MetaHDBC library, which uses Template Haskell to do type-safe database access. Comments are welcomed, especially about the overall quality of the paper, whether it can be called scientific, and anything Mads could do to improve the paper.

qtHaskell 1.1.2. David Harley announced a second preview release of qtHaskell, a set of Haskell bindings for Trolltech's Qt.

Discussion

Library design question. Andre Nathan asked for advice on designing a simple graph library. The resulting discussion included an analysis of using the State monad versus a more functional approach.

A round of golf. Creighton Hogg learns about laziness by making grown men cry.

XML (HXML) parsing :: GHC 6.8.3 space leak from 2000. Lev Walkin discovers a nice example of an obscure class of space leaks while writing some XML-processing code, prompting an in-depth analysis by Simon Marlow.

Proofs and commercial code. Daryoush Mehrtash asked about automated proof tools and techniques, and their uses in the real world.

Blog noise

• Creighton Hogg: Haskell Cafe or: How I learned to stop worrying & love laziness.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Animal as RDR, part II. Doug continues his posts on RDR expert systems.

• Ivan Lazar Miljenovic: Getting Real World Haskell Down Under.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Animal: an RDR implementation study. Doug describes "ripple-down rules" expert systems, and illustrates the types needed to encode one in Haskell.

• Mark Jason Dominus: data Mu f = In (f (Mu f)). Mark writes about fixpoints of type constructors.

• John Goerzen (CosmicRay): Switched from KDE to xmonad. John has taken the plunge to xmonad and seems to like it so far!

• Eric Kow (kowey): darcs weekly news #4. Pre-release of darcs 2.0.3; darcs hacking sprint next month; code.haskell.org upgrades to darcs 2; and other news.

• Mads Lindstroem: MetaHDBC paper (draft). Mads's first paper ever, on using Template Haskell for type-safe database access. Comments welcome!

• Braden Shepherdson: xmonad-light 0.8 Released.

• Manuel M T Chakravarty: GHC HEAD just got a new inference engine for GADTs and type families..

• Magnus Therning: Haskell and Time. Magnus describes the solution to a problem with Data.Time.

• Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Two Papers and a Presentation.

• Xmonad: New xmonad website launched. xmonad has a shiny new website!

Quotes of the Week

• Botje: GHC 11 will have shootout entries as primitives.
• wjt: oh, i see what you're doing. ...no, i don't. *splode*
• Benjamin Pierce: [on existential types] I have a term, and it has a type. So there.
• bos: come on, real programmers use "(((,) <$>) .) . (<*>)"
• quicksilver: #haskell : Sometimes we answer your question, sometimes we lay hideous traps which will devour your soul. It's a risk you take.
• harrison: [on computing 1000000!] it is the same as factorial 999999 * 1000000, big deal

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/ .

Welcome to issue 85 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements

citeproc-hs. Andrea Rossato announced the first release of citeproc-hs, a Haskell implementation of the Citation Style Language. citeproc-hs adds a Bibtex-like citation and bibliographic formatting and generation facility to Pandoc.

Twidge. John Goerzen announced the release of Twidge, a command-line Twitter and Identi.ca client.

Real World HAppS: Cabalized, Self-Demoing HAppS Tutorial (Version 3). Thomas Hartman announced a new version of happs-tutorial, with a correspondingly updated online demo.

generic list functions fixed. Jim Apple reported that genericTake, genericDrop, and genericSplitAt have been fixed so they are now total functions (they used to fail on negative integer inputs, unlike their ungeneric counterparts).

The Monad.Reader (13) - Call for copy. Wouter Swierstra announced a call for copy for Issue 13 of the Monad.Reader. The deadline for submitting articles is February 13, 2009.

Heads Up: code.haskell.org is upgrading to darcs 2. Duncan Coutts announced that /usr/bin/darcs on code.haskell.org will soon be upgraded to version 2. Most users should be unaffected as darcs 2 works just fine with repositories in darcs 1 format, and has been extensively tested for correctness.

Discussion

packages and QuickCheck. Conal Elliott asked what methods of organization people use to package up QuickCheck tests for their libraries.

Hackage needs a theme song!. Jason Dagit wrote a theme song for Hackage!

Jobs

Gamr7. Lionel Barret De Nazaris announced that Gamr7, a startup in France focused on procedural city generation for the game and simulation market, is looking for a senior developer/technical director.

senior role at Credit Suisse. Ganesh Sittampalam announced that Credit Suisse is seeking to recruit an expert in functional programming for a senior role in the Global Modelling and Analytics Group (GMAG) in the Securities Division.

Blog noise

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): What is declarative programming?.

• John Goerzen (CosmicRay): New Twitter Client: Twidge.

• Mark Jason Dominus: Return return. Mark's mind is blown by the code "return return" appearing in a paper by Mark Jones.

• Eric Kow (kowey): darcs weekly news #3.

• Ketil Malde: The FastQ file format for sequences.

• >>> Nathan Sanders: Real World Haskell. Nathan experiments with porting some of his Python code to Haskell.

• Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan): Results from GSoC. Andrea's GSoC work on a high-level dependency framework for Cabal is going to be released in a separate package for now, hbuild.

• >>> Ricky Clarkson: An IRC Bot in Haskell, 20% code, 80% GRR. Ricky shares his experiences, frustrations, and eventual success writing a simple IRC bot in Haskell.

• >>> Yaakov Nemoy: Xmonad 0.8 released.

• Luke Palmer: The problem with Coq. ...is, according to Luke, that it doesn't have a nice graphical interface.

• >>> James Cowie: Haskell! yes no?. James dives into learning some Haskell. Verdict so far: a "very nice language".

Quotes of the Week

• EvilTerran: this is hard to express in this type system. i'm going to make my own type system instead!

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/ .

Welcome to issue 84 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

This is the "This issue is not late since the HWN will henceforth be published on Saturday now that I have real work to do" edition. Featured this week: darcs hacking sprint plans solidify, xmonad 0.8 released, typed sprintf and sscanf, and tons of discussion about everything from functional references to splitting up the base library to the future direction of Haskell.

Announcements

unicode-properties 3.2.0.0, unicode-names 3.2.0.0. Ashley Yakeley announced the release of the unicode-properties 3.2.0.0 and unicode-names 3.2.0.0 packages, which are representations in Haskell of various data in the Unicode 3.2.0 Character Database.

experimental static blog engine in Haskell. jinjing announced the initial release of Panda, an experimental static blog engine written in Haskell.

darcs hacking sprint, venues confirmed! (25-26 October). Eric Y. Kow announced that two venues (Brighton, UK and Portland, Oregon, USA) have been confirmed for the darcs hacking sprint on 25-26 October.

darcs weekly news #2. Eric Y. Kow The second weekly issue of the darcs weekly news has been published.

xmonad 0.8 released!. Don Stewart announced the release of xmonad 0.8, featuring a general purpose "gaps" replacement, locale support, the ability to create your own configuration parsers, and various other enhancements and fixes.

POPL logo design contest. Don Stewart forwarded a message announcing a logo design contest for POPL 2009. Dust off your magic markers/photoshop skills and get designing!

ICFP09 Announcement. Matthew Fluet announced ICFP 2009, to be held 31st August to 2nd September 2009 in Edinburgh. ICFP provides a forum for researchers and developers to hear about the latest work on the design, implementations, principles, and uses of functional programming.

Fast parallel binary-trees for the shootout: Control.Parallel.Strategies FTW!. Don Stewart announced that the Computer Language Shootout recently got a quad core 64 bit machine, and outlined a plan and some initial results for porting the Haskell entries to take advantage of the available parallelism.

The initial view on typed sprintf and sscanf. oleg announced an implementation of typed sprintf and sscanf functions sharing the same formatting specifications, which also led to some interesting discussion and alternative proposals.

Discussion

Generalize groupBy in a useful way?. Bart Massey proposed changing the implementation of groupBy to extend its usefulness for predicates which are not equivalence relations.

Splitting SYB from the base package in GHC 6.10. Jose Pedro Magalhaes initiated a discussion regarding splitting the SYB libraries out of the base package for GHC 6.10.

The base library and GHC 6.10. Ian Lynagh initiated a discussion on further splitting up the base package for GHC 6.10.

Functional references. Tim Newsham began a discussion on functional references and the possibility of merging the existing four or five implementations into something more standard.

Types and Trees. Matt Morrow wrote something about types and type representations, involving some commutative diagrams and some code. I haven't read it yet but it looks neat!

Research language vs. professional language. Ryan Ingram started an interesting discussion on the future direction(s) of the Haskell language.

language proposal: ad-hoc overloading. Ryan Ingram proposed adding ad-hoc name overloading to Haskell, prompting quite a bit of discussion.

Top Level <-. Ashley Yakeley originally asked whether there is any interest in implementing a top level "<-" to run monadic code. This set off a cascade of discussion the likes of which have been rarely seen on the Cafe. I would tell you what the discussion has been about but I must confess that I haven't read it.

Blog noise

• Eric Kow (kowey): darcs hacking sprint (25-26 October 2008).

• Magnus Therning: Confusion with HaskellDB.

• Xmonad: xmonad 0.8 released!.

• Real-World Haskell: Speaking in Silicon Valley next week.

• Luke Palmer: Composable Input for Fruit.

• Luke Palmer: Slicing open the belly of the IO monad in an alternate universe.

• "FP Lunch": Modular Monad Transformers.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Fuzzy unification parser in Haskell.

• Bjoern Edstroem: Speeding up Haskell with C -- a very short introduction.

• Eric Kow (kowey): darcs weekly news #2.

• Roman Cheplyaka: Physics and polyhedra.

• Well-Typed.Com: The new haskell.org community SPARC server is online.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): A stream of primes as Comonad.

• Eric Kidd: Ubiquitous Hoogle. Eric shows how to integrate a Hoogle search command into Ubiquity.

• Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part 3. The vector space monad and rational tangles.

Quotes of the Week

• dons: maybe we should do a "recommend RWH to a java programmer" campaign :)
• gwern: we fill fight them in the registers, we will fight them in the caches; we shall fight them in the core, and even in the backing store. And we shall never surrender!

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/ .

Welcome to issue 83 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

This is the "better late than never" edition. As an excuse I could tell you that my home internet service has been horrible (now fixed) and I was away from home for a few days with my wife celebrating our third wedding anniversary. But instead, I give you a link to the Uncyclopedia entry on Haskell. If you haven't already seen it, you should give it a read, being sure not to drink any milk at the same time, or at least pointing your nose away from the keyboard if you insist on drinking milk.

Community News

If Dell sends John Goerzen (CosmicRay) one more catalog, it will actually be a federal crime.

Announcements

LogFloat 0.9. wren ng thornton announced a new official release of the logfloat package for manipulating log-domain floating numbers. This release is mainly for those who are playing with Transfinite rather than LogFloat, but the interface changes warrant a minor version change.

validating xml lib - need some guidance. Marc Weber asked for help developing an xml generating library validating the result against a given DTD.

gsl-random 0.1 and monte-carlo-0.1. Patrick Perry announced that he has started on bindings for the random number generators and random distributions provided by the gsl. He has also written a monad and transformer for doing monte carlo computations that uses gsl-random internally. For a quick tutorial in the latter package, see his blog.

Wired 0.1.1. Emil Axelsson announced the first release of the hardware description library Wired. Wired can be seen as an extension to Lava that targets (not exclusively) semi-custom VLSI design. A particular aim of Wired is to give the designer more control over the routing wires' effects on performance.

darcs weekly news #1. Eric Kow sent out the first edition of the new Darcs Weekly News!

zip-archive 0.0. John MacFarlane announced the release of the zip-archive library for dealing with zip archives.

The Monad.Reader - Issue 11. Wouter Swierstra announced a new issue of The Monad.Reader, with articles by David Place, Kenn Knowles, and Doug Auclair.

First Monad Tutorial of the Season. Hans van Thiel announced a new monad tutorial, The Greenhorn's Guide to becoming a Monad Cowboy.

"Real World Haskell" hits a milestone. Bryan O'Sullivan proudly announced that the draft manuscript of Real World Haskell is complete! It is now available online in its entirety. The authors expect the final book to be published around the beginning of November, and to weigh in at about 700 pages.

Mueval 0.5.1, 0.6, 0.6.1, 0.6.2, 0.6.3, 0.6.4. Gwern Branwen announced a number of new releases of Mueval. Lambdabot now uses mueval for all its dynamic Haskell evaluation needs.

Hoogle Database Generation. Neil Mitchell (ndm) announced that a new release of the Hoogle command line is out, including bug fixes and additional features. Upgrading is recommended.Two interesting features of Hoogle 4 are working with multiple function databases (from multiple packages), and running your own web server.

Blog noise

• Real-World Haskell: Source handed over to production.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Earning \bot-Trophies.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Scanner-parsers II: State Monad Transformers.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Scanner-parsers I: lifting functions.

• >>> software engineering radio: Episode 108: Simon Peyton Jones on Functional Programming and Haskell. A podcast interview with Simon Peyton Jones.

• Neil Mitchell: Running your own Hoogle on a Web Server.

• Braden Shepherdson: Announcing xmonad-light. Braden is rolling out a new configuration framework for xmonad, providing an easier learning curve for those not wanting to learn Haskell right away, and an easy transition to a more powerful Haskell configuration when they want it.

• Gabor Grief: Category. Gabor is excited that base-3.0 will include Control.Category.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Ten = 1+2+3+4. Solving an arithmetic puzzle with Haskell, Prolog-style.

• Paul R Brown: perpubplat now on github.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): "Lucky you!"?. Doug shares some secrets of his success in getting Haskell/Dylan/Mercury/Prolog jobs.

• Neil Mitchell: Hoogle Database Generation. Neil releases a new command-line version of Hoogle, including bug fixes and additional features -- multiple function databases and the ability to run your own Hoogle server.

• Patrick Perry: A Monte Carlo Monad for Haskell.

• Mads Lindstroem: Proposal: Adding composability to WxHaskell.

• Tom Moertel: PXSL Tools now on Hackage and GitHub.

• Gabor Greif: Uploaded. Gabor uploads his first contribution to Hackage, thrist-0.1.

• Muad`Dib (vixey): Tail Call Optimization doesn't exist in Haskell.

• >>> Hans van Thiel: The Greenhorn's Guide to becoming a Monad Cowboy. YAMT

• Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part 2. Dan continues his excellent series on rational tangles, this time showing the connection between tangles and rational numbers.

• >>> Praki Prakash: Learning Haskell Redux.

• Gabor Greif: Ca(ni)balized. Gabor creates his first cabal package!

• Real-World Haskell: Our writing is now complete!.

• Tom Moertel: Thinking algebraically: a functional-programming dividend that pays during your imperative-programming day job.

• Jason Dagit: Darcs 2 Real-World Push Performance Evaluation.

• Well-Typed.Com: What's wrong with make?. A lot, apparently: it's too static, and makes it easy to write incorrect rules. Duncan (dcoutts) provides an analysis.

• Dougal Stanton: Lord of the Flies as a window onto monadic IO.

• Real-World Haskell: A tighter page count estimate. Real World Haskell is going to be about 700 pages!?

• Real-World Haskell: Real World Haskell tutorial next month at DEFUN 2008.

Quotes of the Week

• shepheb: #haskell isn't so much on-topic when discussing Haskell, but off-off-topic.
• chrisdone: it's neat how you learn haskell because you are drawn in by the purely functional paradigm, and then you find loads more things like algebraic data types, monad abstractions, arrows and applicative, lack of objects... so that when people say "well, it's not haskell, but at least X is functional", it's just not the same at all
• lambdabot: [tristes_tigres] @vixen unsafe [lambdabot] you're turning me on :)
• b\6: sometimes i make variables f and ck and find some reason to multiply them like f*ck if i'm having a bad day.
• waynemokane: wow... thanks everyone - it looks like I have a full day of reading type signatures ahead of me.
• mauke: call/cthulhu
• seydar: monads are just like saran wrap.
• b\6: keep this info private, but you can actually overclock your brain. the technique i use is to loop mplayer playing oggs but increase the speed like -speed 1.25 for 125% normal. your brain's speed increases accordingly, allowing you to solve problems much more easily.

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/ .

Welcome to issue 82 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements

Lava2000 on Hackage. Emil Axelsson announced that Lava2000 has been uploaded to Hackage. Lava is a structural hardware description library embedded in Haskell. This version of Lava focuses on verification, and connects to a number of different verification engines (although only Smv and Satzoo are maintained in this version).

QuickCheck and HPC Tutorial. Andy Gill announced a half day tutorial on QuickCheck and HPC to be held at DEFUN, taught by Andy Gill and Koen Claessen. The latest version of QuickCheck will also be released in conjunction with the tutorial.

Compiler Construction course using Haskell?. Johannes Waldmann announced that he plans to give a course in compiler construction, using Haskell as the implementation language. Any comments are appreciated, especially from anyone who has given or taken such a course.

witness 0.1, open-witness 0.1. Ashley Yakeley announced the release of these new packages and the draft paper on which they are based.

posix-realtime 0.0.1. Vasili Galchin announced the release of the posix-realtime package.

benchpress 0.2.1. Johan Tibell announced the first public release of benchpress, a micro-benchmark library that produces statistics such as min, mean, standard deviation, median, and max execution time.

wavconvert 0.1.1. Tim Chevalier announced the release of wavconvert, a tool which takes a directory tree as an argument, and converts any .wav files in it to .ogg (using an external OGG encoder) while filling in the ID3 tags based on the directory names.

darcs hacking sprint (25-26 October). Eric Y. Kow announced a darcs hacking sprint, to be held on the 25-26 of October, in Cambridge and Portland (and over IRC). The perfect opportunity to get involved, if you are interested in doing some hacking on darcs. Let Eric know if you are interested.

X Haskell Bindings. Antoine Latter announced that he is slowly porting XCB (the X C Bindings) to Haskell, and would like input from any interested parties.

logfloat. wren ng thornton announced the release of the logfloat package for manipulating log-domain floating numbers. The main reason for casting numbers into the log-domain is to prevent underflow when multiplying many small probabilities as is done in Hidden Markov Models and other statistical models often used for natural language processing. The log-domain also helps prevent overflow when multiplying many large numbers.

Roguestar 0.2.2. Christopher Lane Hinson announced the release of version 0.2.2 of Roguestar.

Google Summer of Code

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

Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on Hoogle 4. This week, he worked on getting out the last kinks to make Hoogle 4 usable as a replacement for Hoogle 3. Although this is the last official week of the GSoC, he plans to continue working on it when he has time.

DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a physics engine using Data Parallel Haskell.

GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC.

Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal.

Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99.

Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries.

GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on improvements to the GHC API.

Jobs

Platform Architect at Peerium, Inc.. Don Stewart forwarded a job opportunity for a Haskell programmer at Peerium, Inc. Peerium is building a new software platform for direct, real-time communication and collaboration within graphically rich environments, and is looking for a platform architect proficient in Haskell to work with the founders to design and implement components of the runtime and supporting libraries for our software platform. Resumes should be forwarded to hr peerium.com.

Blog noise

• Don Stewart: The 500 Packages: Haskell, Distros, and Maintainership.

• Neil Mitchell: Hoogle New Features. Neil has finished his Google Summer of Code work on the new version of Hoogle, but still intends to continue working on it when he gets the chance. A number of new features have been added.

• Well-Typed.Com: Solving the diamond dependency problem. Duncan explains how the newest version of Cabal (mostly) solves the DDDP (dreaded diamond dependency problem).

• Real-World Haskell: Two new chapters, preorder links, and a page count estimate. Two new beta chapters are up!

• Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part 1. Dan continues his fascinating series on rational tangles, showing how to describe a tangle using do-notation.

• Christopher Lane Hinson: ANN: Roguestar 0.2.2.

• Luis Araujo: Himerge (and Haskell) out to the street!.

• Neil Mitchell: GSoC Hoogle: Week 12.

• Twan van Laarhoven: A generic merge function.

• Luke Palmer: Slicing open the belly of the IO monad in an alternate universe. Luke explores methods of safely performing some I/O without the IO monad in the context of FRP.

• Ketil Malde: The wee beginnings of a biohaskell tutorial? -- and some thoughts on programming productivity.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Using Difference Lists.

• Real-World Haskell: Mid-August status update.

Quotes of the Week

• SimonM: People don't seem to believe me when I say this. In retrospect we shouldn't have called it forkOS, we should have called it forkReallyExpensiveOnlyNecessaryForCallingOpenGL_IO.
• quicksilver: unsafeInterleaveIO gives you a way to cheat if you're happy to descend into a mire of programs with no semantics.
• dmhouse: Eurgh, metastereo quotes.
• quicksilver: [on @yhjulwwiefzojcbxybbruweejw] it's the noise a haskell developer makes if you kick him in the de bruijn index.

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/ .

Welcome to issue 81 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

This week saw some interesting talks at AngloHaskell, and some cool new packages to hit Hackage, like Language.C, AERN-Real, FTGL, and Hoogle. What are you waiting for? Get out there and build something!

Announcements

Initial release of Language.C (language-c-0.3). Benedikt Huber announced the first release of Language.C, a library for analysing and generating C code. This release features a reasonably well tested parser, a pretty printer, and a preview of the analysis framework.

darcs roadmap. Jason Dagit wrote to the list to thank everyone for their support for darcs, and to announce a webpage with a roadmap for future darcs features. Darcs is alive and well!

Anglo Haskell 2008 -- slides and audio. Matthew Sackman announced that slides and audio from Anglo Haskell 2008 are now available.

BLAS bindings for haskell, version 0.5. Patrick Perry announced a new release of the Haskell BLAS bindings, including a number of new features and improvements.

Tutorial on information visualization and visual analytics in Haskell. Jefferson Heard announced the tutorial he will be presenting at DEFUN 2008, to give everyone a sneak peek at the long version of the tutorial before he's done with it. Comments and questions are welcome and encouraged.

interval and polynomial enclosure arithmetics. Michal Konecny announced the release of the AERN-Real and AERN-RnToRm packages, which model and reasonably efficiently implement exact real arithmetic.

FTGL 1.0. Portable truetype font rendering in OpenGL. Jefferson Heard announced the release of Haskell bindings to FTGL, an easy to use library for portable rendering of TrueType fonts in OpenGL.

Google Summer of Code

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

GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. This week, he gave a talk at AngloHaskell.

Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. This week, he announced the first release of the Language.C package.

Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on Hoogle 4. This week, he released several command-line versions and a web version of Hoogle 4, updated the manual, and gave a talk at AngloHaskell. Next week, he plans to work on generating better Hoogle databases, and some bug fixes.

DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a physics engine using Data Parallel Haskell. This week, he added complete support for general polyhedra, and fixed some bugs in the collision handler. He also added support for bounding spheres, although the results so far are disappointing, due to delays in the GHC implementation of parallel arrays. Next week, he plans to implement static bodies and BSP trees.

Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries.

GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on improvements to the GHC API.

Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal.

Blog noise

• >>> Nicholas Lativy: Haskell in less than five minutes. Nicholas refreshes his memory of Haskell.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Monoid use.

• Roman Cheplyaka: Status report: week 11-12.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Combinatory Birds as Types.

• Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Getting Better, part ][.

• Neil Mitchell: GSoC Hoogle: Week 11.

• Max Bolingbroke: Compiler Plugins AngloHaskell Talk.

• London Haskell Users Group: Video: Paradise, a DSEL for Derivatives Pricing.

• Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach): Compiling GHC. Roman records his experiences building the latest development version of GHC.

• Luke Palmer: Mindfuck: The Reverse State Monad.

• Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part 0.

• Joachim Breitner: Xmonad on my mobile phone.

• Luke Palmer: Composable Input for Fruit.

• >>> Louis: A Gentle Introduction to Haskell. Louis is learning Haskell by working through the Gentle Introduction.

• >>> Bryan St. Amour: Some Project Euler. Bryan learns some Haskell the good old-fashioned way---by solving Project Euler problems.

• Magnus Therning: TagSoup, meet Parsec!. Magnus uses Parsec to parse streams of tags.

• Thomas M. DuBuisson: hsXenCtrl and pureMD5.

• Alpheccar: Haskell, iPhone and Biotech.

• >>> codeflow: About AI and neural networks. codeflow implements neural networks in Haskell for some soccer-playing AI software.

• >>> Vincent Kriek: And the winner is.... Vincent decides to stick with xmonad.

• >>> Matthew Trinneer: A New Paradigm - Haskell and HAppS.

Quotes of the Week

• Anatoly Yakovenko: theory doesn't scare me. i am using haskell after all, so i am used to reading long winded papers.
• bwr: mapM_ putStrLn$reverse[(++)([1..y-30]>>" ")$concat$map([" "," /", " -", " \\"]!!)[(foldr(.)(scanl(+)1)([1..y]>>[scanl(+)0])[2..]!!(2*(1+y)+x))`mod`4|x<-[-y-2..59-y*2]]|y<-[30..61]]

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/ .