Haskell Weekly News: March 27, 2006
Greetings, and thanks for reading issue 30 of HWN, a weekly newsletter
covering developments in the Haskell community. Each Monday, new
editions are posted to [1]the Haskell mailing list and to [2]The
Haskell Sequence. [3]RSS is also available.
A busy, exciting week!
1. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
2. http://sequence.complete.org/
3. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
Announcements
* monadLib 2.0. Iavor Diatchki [4]announced the release of monadLib
2.0 -- library of monad transformers for Haskell. 'monadLib' is a
descendent of 'mtl', the monad template library that is
distributed with most Haskell implementations. Check out the
[5]library web page.
4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13460
5. http://www.csee.ogi.edu/~diatchki/monadLib
* Text.Regex.Lazy (0.33). Chris Kuklewicz [6]announced the release
of [7]Text.Regex.Lazy. This is an alternative to Text.Regex along
with some enhancements. GHC's Text.Regex marshals the data back
and forth to C arrays, to call libc. This is far too slow (and
strict). This module understands regular expression Strings via a
Parsec parser and creates an internal data structure
(Text.Regex.Lazy.Pattern). This is then transformed into a Parsec
parser to process the input String, or into a DFA table for
matching against the input String or FastPackedString. The input
string is consumed lazily, so it may be an arbitrarily long or
infinite source.
6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4464
7. http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazy-regex
* HDBC 0.99.2. John Goerzen [8]released HDBC 0.99.2, along with
0.99.2 versions of all database backends. John says "If things go
well, after a few weeks of testing, this version will become HDBC
1.0.0". [9]HDBC is a multi-database interface system for Haskell.
8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13504
9. http://quux.org/devel/hdbc
* Planet Haskell. Isaac Jones [10]asked if someone could volunteer
to set up "Planet Haskell", an RSS feed aggregator in the style of
Planet Debian, Planet Gnome or Planet Perl. Happily, Antti-Juhani
Kaijanaho stepped up, and now Planet Haskell is live at
[11]http://planet.haskell.org. Antti-Juhani asks that any Haskell
people with blogs submit their feed urls to him, so check it out!
10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/12033
11. http://planet.haskell.org/
* Haskell on Gentoo Linux Duncan Coutts [12]writes that GHC 6.4.1
has been marked stable on x86, amd64, sparc and ppc, for
[13]Gentoo Linux. (We also support ppc64, alpha and hppa.) Gentoo
also has a collection of over 30 Haskell libraries and tools.
There is also a #gentoo-haskell [14]irc channel on freenode.
12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/9557
13. http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=ghc
14. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel
* Concurrent Yhc. The Yhc dev team [15]reports that Yhc now includes
support for concurrency! The interface is the same as Concurrent
GHC. Currently only
+ Control.Concurrent
+ Control.Concurrent.MVar
+ Control.Concurrent.QSem
are implemented, however many other abstractions can be written in
Haskell in terms of MVars.
15. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/yhc/2006-March/000085.html
* GHC 6.4.2 Release Candidates Simon Marlow [16]announced that GHC
was moving into release-candidate mode for version 6.4.2. [17]Grab
a snapshot and try it out. The available builds are:
x86_64-unknown-linux (Fedora Core 5), i386-unknown-linux (glibc
2.3 era), and Windows (i386-unknown-mingw32). Barring any serious
hiccups, the release should be out in a couple of weeks.
16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/9588
17. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/stable/dist/
* HaRe 0.3. Sneaking out without us noticing, in January, a [18]new
snapshot of HaRe, the Haskell refactoring tool, was released. This
snapshot of HaRe 0.3 is now compatible with the latest GHC and
Programmatica. New refactorings have also been added.
18. http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/refactor-fp/hare.html
Haskell'
This section covers activity on [19]Haskell' standardisation process.
* [20]Bringing discusison to a close
* [21]Time to focus discussion
* [22]Collections interface
* [23]MonadPlus reform
* [24]Strict tuples
* [25]seq as a class method
* [26]Alternatives to . for composition
* [27]Concurrency
* [28]Pre-emptive or co-operative concurrency
* [29]Liberal type synonyms
19. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1084
21. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/992
22. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1003
23. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1005
24. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/995
25. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1033
26. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1041
27. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1057
28. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1057
29. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1075
Discussion
* Disruptive Haskell. Paul Johnson [30]forked a long discussion on
how Haskell can be seen as a disruptive technology, and what
Haskell's "brand" might be. Many interesting contributions were
made.
30. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13475
* Bit streaming Haskell. Per Gustafsson, having made a proposal to
extend the Erlang `binary' data type from being a sequence of
bytes (a byte stream) to being a sequence of bits (a bitstream),
with the ability to do pattern matching at the bit level,
[31]asked for help writing efficient (and beautiful) Haskell
versions of his [32]bitstream benchmarks. Several improved
programs were submitted, bringing the Haskell code into line with
the OCaml and Erlang entries.
31. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/12040
32. http://bitbenches.infogami.com/
Quotes of the Week
Pseudonym's condensed LtU guide to the static types vs dynamic types
debate:
* Haskell-vs-Scheme is an issue on which reasonable people differ.
* Ruby-vs-Java is an issue on which unreasonable people differ.
Everything else is details. :-)
Seen on #haskell:
shapr :: Science News had an article about a tribe of isolated villagers
in Brazil that don't have recursion or indirection in their language.
Contributing to HWN
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darcs get http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/hwn
33. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
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