[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 92 - November 8, 2008

[Andrew Coppin]

Brent Yorgey wrote:
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Haskell Weekly News
> http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20081108
> Issue 92 - November 08, 2008
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>    GHC version 6.10.1. Ian Lynagh [2]announced the release of [3]GHC
>    version 6.10.1! This new major release features a number of significant
>    changes, including wild-card patterns, punning, and field
>    disambiguation in record syntax; generalised quasi-quotes; generalised
>    SQL-like list comprehensions; view patterns; a complete
>    reimplementation of type families; parallel garbage collection; a new
>    extensible exception framework; a more user-friendly API; included Data
>    Parallel Haskell (DPH); and more! See [4]the full release notes for
>    more information.
>   

Were it not for this message, I might never have noticed! :-}

(Presumably the main "announcement" was on one of the other Haskell 
lists...)

Anyway, I don't see it anywhere in the release notes, but I get the vibe 
that type families are supposed to be "fully working" now. Is that 
correct? If so, why no mention anywhere?

Also, the release notes tantelisingly hint that the long-awaited 
parallel-array stuff is finally working in this release, but I can't 
find any actual description of how to use it. All the DPH stuff seems on 
the wiki was last updated many months ago. You would have thought that 
such a big deal would be well-documented. It must have taken enough 
effort to get it to work! You'd think somebody would want to shout about 
it...