[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 89 - October 18, 2008

Brent Yorgey byorgey at seas.upenn.edu
Sat Oct 18 10:51:32 EDT 2008


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20081018
Issue 89 - October 18, 2008
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   Welcome to issue 89 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

Announcements

   New Haskell tutorial. Miran Lipovaca (BONUS) has written a new and most
   excellent Haskell tutorial, [2]"Learn You a Haskell For Great Good!".

   Glob 0.1, globbing library. Matti Niemenmaa [3]announced the release of
   [4]Glob 0.1, a [5]small library for glob-matching purposes based on a
   subset of zsh's syntax.

   hledger 0.1, command-line accounting tool. Simon Michael [6]announced
   the [7]first release of [8]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 [9]announced a [10]"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 [11]announced the
   [12]first release of [13]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 [14]announced the [15]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 [16]call for
   contributions to the 15th edition of the [17]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 [18]announced the release of the
   [19]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 [20]announced a
   [21]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 [22]announced [23]GHC 6.10.0.20081007, the
   first release candidate for GHC 6.10.1. There is also a [24]status page
   for GHC 6.10.1.

   Graphalyze-0.4 and SourceGraph-0.2. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic [25]announced
   the release of version 0.4 of the [26]Graphalyze library and version
   0.2 of the [27]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 [28]announced the release of a simple
   list zipper library to Hackage, [29]ListZipper-1.1.0.0.

   darcs 2.1.0. Eric Kow [30]announced the release of [31]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 [32]announced the [33]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 [34]asked for
   Haskell-themed desktop wallpapers, and the community responded with
   quite a few nice images.

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

   Repair to floating point enumerations?. Malcolm Wallace began a
   [36]discussion on the merits of changing the (admittedly wonky) H98
   [37]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 [38]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
   [39]proposed adding sortOn (:: Ord b => (a -> b) -> [40]-> [a) and
   related functions to Data.List.

Blog noise

   [41]Haskell news from the [42]blogosphere.
     * Andy Gill: [43]Pretty Printing Code with Markup. writes about a
       [44]new version of the HughesPJ pretty printing library which
       allows for pretty-printing with markup.
     * "FP Lunch": [45]Is purity inefficient?. Are idiomatic pure
       functional programs less efficient than idiomatic impure ones?
     * Eric Kow (kowey): [46]darcs weekly news #8.
     * Conal Elliott: [47]Composing memo tries.
     * Conal Elliott: [48]Elegant memoization with functional memo tries.
     * >>> Paolo Capriotti: [49]Monads for Markov chains.
     * Real-World Haskell: [50]Production status update: we're in QC1.
     * Joachim Breitner: [51]Infinite loops in Haskell.
     * Luke Palmer: [52]FRP Rant.
     * Luke Palmer: [53]data-memocombinators.
     * Bryan O'Sullivan: [54]Using Bloom filters for large scale gene
       sequence analysis in Haskell. Bryan and Ketil Malde's paper was
       accepted to PADL 09!
     * Arnar Birgisson: [55]Generating legal subsets of a dependency
       graph.
     * Creighton Hogg: [56]A silly example and a brief history.
     * >>> Robert Ottaway: [57]Sorting using Haskell.
     * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [58]Untangling with Continued Fractions: part
       5.
     * Holumbus: [59]Source Links Are Back!.
     * London Haskell Users Group: [60]Getting things going again.
     * >>> Justin Bailey: [61]The Haskell Cheatsheet.
     * >>> Nathan Sanders: [62]Type-directed programming.
     * >>> Micah Cowan: [63]Adventures in Haskell, Part 2: Kewlness.
     * Manuel M T Chakravarty: [64]GpuGen: Bringing the Power of GPUs to
       Haskell..
     * >>> Binu Raghavan: [65]Haskell.... Binu is trying to learn Haskell.
     * Bjoern Edstroem: [66]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 [67]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [68]the Haskell Sequence and [69]Planet Haskell. [70]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [71]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [72]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [73]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://learnyouahaskell.com/
   3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/46583
   4. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Glob
   5. http://iki.fi/matti.niemenmaa/glob/index.html
   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/46461
   7. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/hledger
   8. http://joyful.com/Ledger#hledger
   9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/46122
  10. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/CheatSheet
  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/46076
  12. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Salsa
  13. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Salsa
  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/46072
  15. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/maccatcher
  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45967
  17. http://www.haskell.org/communities/
  18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45953
  19. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/data-ivar
  20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/15442
  21. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Upgrading_packages#Typical_breakages_with_GHC_6.10
  22. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/15376
  23. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/stable/dist/6.10.1-rc-1/rc.html
  24. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GHC-6.10.1
  25. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16473
  26. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Graphalyze
  27. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/SourceGraph
  28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16468
  29. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/ListZipper
  30. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16465
  31. http://darcs.net/darcs-2.1.0.tar.gz
  32. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell/2008-October/020648.html
  33. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/yi
  34. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45961
  35. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16477
  36. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/2678
  37. http://haskell.org/onlinereport/basic.html#sect6.3.4
  38. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/10206
  39. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/10184
  40. file://localhost/home/brent/haskell/hwn/a]
  41. http://planet.haskell.org/
  42. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  43. http://blog.unsafeperformio.com/?p=31
  44. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/marked%2Dpretty
  45. http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fplunch/weblog/?p=113
  46. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/10/darcs-weekly-news-8.html
  47. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/conal/~3/422189172/
  48. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/conal/~3/422171822/
  49. http://pcapriotti.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/monads-for-markov-chains/
  50. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/10/15/production-status-update-were-in-qc1/
  51. https://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/archives/308-Infinite-loops-in-Haskell.html
  52. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/10/15/frp-rant/
  53. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/10/14/data-memocombinators/
  54. http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2008/09/28/using-bloom-filters-for-large-scale-gene-sequence-analysis-in-haskell/
  55. http://www.hvergi.net/2008/10/generating-legal-subsets-of-a-dependency-graph/
  56. http://abstractabsurd.blogspot.com/2008/10/silly-example-and-brief-history.html
  57. http://tech-nickel.blogspot.com/2008/10/sorting-using-haskell.html
  58. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/10/untangling-with-continued-fractions.html
  59. http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/blog/?p=15
  60. http://www.londonhug.net/2008/10/11/getting-things-going-again/
  61. http://blog.codeslower.com/2008/10/The-Haskell-Cheatsheet
  62. http://sandersn.com/blog/index.php?title=type_directed_programming
  63. http://micah.cowan.name/2008/10/10/computers/software-development/adventures-in-haskell-part-2-kewlness/
  64. http://justtesting.org/post/53418059
  65. http://variably-volatile.blogspot.com/2008/10/haskell.html
  66. http://blog.bjrn.se/2008/10/lets-build-mp3-decoder.html
  67. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  68. http://sequence.complete.org/
  69. http://planet.haskell.org/
  70. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  71. http://haskell.org/
  72. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  73. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/


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