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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080920
Issue 86 - September 20, 2008
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Welcome to issue 86 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
[1]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 [2]sent out a revised proposal
for GHC version control.
darcs 2.0.3pre1. Eric Kow [3]announced the first pre-release of
[4]darcs 2.0.3, featuring a few major bug fixes and a handful of
interesting features.
EMGM. Sean Leather [5]announced a release of [6]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 [7]announced the release of [8]pandoc
1.0.0.1, the swiss army knife of text markup formats.
Iteratee-based IO. oleg [9]described a [10]safe, declarative approach
to input processing which will be the subject of a talk at DEFUN08 on
September 27.
MetaHDBC paper. Mads Lindstroem [11]announced a [12]draft version of a
paper about the [13]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 [14]announced a second preview release of
[15]qtHaskell, a set of Haskell bindings for Trolltech's Qt.
Discussion
Library design question. Andre Nathan [16]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 [17]learns about laziness by [18]making
grown men cry.
XML (HXML) parsing :: GHC 6.8.3 space leak from 2000. Lev Walkin
[19]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 [20]asked about automated
proof tools and techniques, and their uses in the real world.
Blog noise
[21]Haskell news from the [22]blogosphere.
* Creighton Hogg: [23]Haskell Cafe or: How I learned to stop worrying
& love laziness.
* Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [24]Animal as RDR, part II. Doug
continues his posts on RDR expert systems.
* Ivan Lazar Miljenovic: [25]Getting Real World Haskell Down Under.
* Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [26]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: [27]data Mu f = In (f (Mu f)). Mark writes
about fixpoints of type constructors.
* John Goerzen (CosmicRay): [28]Switched from KDE to xmonad. John has
taken the plunge to xmonad and seems to like it so far!
* Eric Kow (kowey): [29]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: [30]MetaHDBC paper (draft). Mads's first paper
ever, on using Template Haskell for type-safe database access.
Comments welcome!
* Braden Shepherdson: [31]xmonad-light 0.8 Released.
* Manuel M T Chakravarty: [32]GHC HEAD just got a new inference
engine for GADTs and type families..
* Magnus Therning: [33]Haskell and Time. Magnus describes the
solution to a problem with Data.Time.
* Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [34]Two Papers and a Presentation.
* Xmonad: [35]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 [36]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
[37]the Haskell Sequence and [38]Planet Haskell. [39]RSS is also
available, and headlines appear on [40]haskell.org.
To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
information on [41]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
[42]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .
References
1. http://haskell.org/
2. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/libraries/2008-September/010661.html
3. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047664.html
4. http://www.darcs.net/darcs-2.0.3pre1.tar.gz
5. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047751.html
6. http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/GenericProgramming/EMGM
7. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047437.html
8. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/pandoc
9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44828
10. http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/Iteratee/
11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44713
12. http://lindstroem.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/metahdbc.pdf
13. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/MetaHDBC
14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16425
15. http://qthaskell.berlios.de/
16. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44733
17.
http://abstractabsurd.blogspot.com/2008/09/haskell-cafe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop.html
18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44724
19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44708
20. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047440.html
21. http://planet.haskell.org/
22. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
23.
http://abstractabsurd.blogspot.com/2008/09/haskell-cafe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop.html
24. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/09/animal-as-rdr-part-ii.html
25.
http://ivanmiljenovic.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/getting-real-world-haskell-down-under/
26.
http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/09/animal-rdr-implementation-study.html
27. http://blog.plover.com/prog/springschool95-2.html
28. http://changelog.complete.org/posts/756-Switched-from-KDE-to-xmonad.html
29. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/09/darcs-weekly-news-4.html
30. http://lindstroem.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/metahdbc-paper-draft/
31. http://braincrater.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/xmonad-light-08-released/
32. http://justtesting.org/post/50500880
33. http://therning.org/magnus/archives/389
34. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/09/two-papers-and-presentation.html
35. http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/new-xmonad-website-launched/
36. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
37. http://sequence.complete.org/
38. http://planet.haskell.org/
39. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
40. http://haskell.org/
41. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
42. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/
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