---
Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20090328
Issue 111 - March 28, 2009
---
Welcome to issue 111 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
[1]Haskell community.
Announcements
CHP package. Neil Brown [2]announced the release of version 1.2.0 of
the [3]CHP library (which supports explicit message-passing concurrency
in Haskell), with various bug-fixes and a new clock synchronisation
primitive.
smartword 0.0.0.5 Web based flash card for Word Smart I and II
vocabularies. Ki Yung Ahn [4]announced the release of [5]smartword
0.0.0.5, a web based flash card system for Word Smart I and II, a
popular book series for studying GRE vocabularies.
HackMail 0.0 -- Procmail + Monads = Awesome!. Joe Fredette [6]announced
his very second Hackage upload, [7]HackMail. Hackmail is a
Procmail-alike, though it doesn't (yet) support procmail syntax. It
dynamically loads a haskell source file and then sits as a daemon
watching a directory for new emails. The source file contains a
function which sorts email and delivers it to some directory.
FallingBlocks 0.1. Ben Sanders [8]announced [9]fallingblocks, a Tetris
clone using SDL.
io-capture-0.2 capturing std(out|err) in IO action. Yusaku Hashimoto
[10]announced the release of [11]io-capture 0.2, a library to capture
stdout and stderr in an IO action. It exports a function capture, which
takes an IO action and a String representing the entire input, and
returns Strings representing the data written to stdout and stderr.
wxAsteroids 1.0. Henk-Jan van Tuyl [12]announced [13]wxAsteroids, a
game demonstrating the wxHaskell GUI.
The votes are in!. Eelco Lempsink [14]announced that the [15]results of
the Haskell logo competition are in! Congratulations to Jeff Wheeler on
his winning design.
Making videos of your project. Don Stewart [16]described how to create
short screencasts showing off your latest awesome Haskell project.
WinGhci, a GUI for GHCI on Windows. Pepe Gallardo [17]announced the
first release of [18]WinGhci, a simple GUI for GHCI on Windows. It is
closely based on WinHugs, and provides similar functionality.
hranker: Basic utility for ranking a list of items (e.g. for the logo
poll). Robin Green [19]announced [20]hranker, a command-line utility
that helps the user rank a list of items (of any type implementing
Show, Eq and Ord). The hope is that the code is sufficiently clear that
it could also serve as an educational piece of code, especially for
people wanting to learn how to use the HCL library.
salvia-0.1, salvia-extras-0.1. Sebastiaan Visser [21]announced a new
version of [22]Salvia, a lightweight Haskell Web Server Framework.
Changes in this release include easier dependencies, some new default
handler environments that simplify setting up a server application,
support for keep-alive, a great deal of additional documentation,
support for Windows, and various cleanup and bug fixes.
Haddock 2.4.2. David Waern [23]announced a new release of [24]Haddock,
the Haskell documentation tool. This is a bug fix release only, and
it's the same version that will ship with GHC 6.10.2, unless any
important problems are discovered before the GHC release. Because the
.haddock file format has changed, links to previously installed
documentation will not work when generating documentation using this
version.
ansi-terminal, ansi-wl-pprint - ANSI terminal support for Haskell. Max
Bolingbroke [25]announced the [26]ansi-terminal and [27]ansi-wl-pprint
packages, which allow Haskell programs to produce much richer console
output by allowing colorisation, emboldening and so on. Both Unix-like
(OS X, Linux) and Windows operating systems are supported (via a pure
Haskell ANSI emulation layer for Windows).
I/O library for Windows. Felix Martini [28]announced the [29]package,
an I/O library for Windows using Windows API functions with I/O
completion port support. The main goal of this library is to support
Simon Marlow's new Handle API once he has added that to GHC. The
library also has a compatibility module for socket functions from the
network-bytestring package.
Discussion
Grouping - Map / Reduce. Günther Schmidt [30]asked about a way to
lazily group an unordered list of key/value pairs, leading to some
interesting solutions and discussion of preserving laziness.
about Haskell code written to be too smart. Manlio Perillo began an
[31]epic discussion about Haskell coding style, idioms, pedagogy, and
much, much more.
Blog noise
[32]Haskell news from the [33]blogosphere.
* : [34]I18n and Haskell. Internationalization of Haskell
programs.
* Holumbus: [35]Holumbus-Distribution
