[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: July 03, 2006
Donald Bruce Stewart
dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
Sun Jul 2 23:29:12 EDT 2006
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Haskell Weekly News
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
Issue 39 - July 03, 2006
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Welcome to issue 39 of HWN, a weekly newsletter covering developments
in the Haskell community. Each week, new editions are posted to [1]the
Haskell mailing list as well as to [2]the Haskell Sequence and
[3]Planet Haskell. [4]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on
[5]haskell.org.
A week of busy activity in the community. Thanks to Simon Marlow and
Josef Svenningsson for contributions to this issue.
1. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
2. http://sequence.complete.org/
3. http://planet.haskell.org/
4. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
5. http://haskell.org/
Announcements
* HDBC 1.0 . John Goerzen [6]released the latest HDBC. HDBC is a
database tool, modeled loosely on Perl's DBI interface, though it
has also been influenced by Python's DB-API v2, JDBC in Java, and
HSQL in Haskell. You can find the code [7]here.
6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13879
7. http://quux.org/devel/hdbc
* hpodder . John Goerzen [8]announced the first release of hpodder.
hpodder is a podcast downloader (podcatcher) written in pure
Haskell. It exists because John was unsatisfied with the other
podcatchers for Linux. Full details [9]here.
8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13880
9. http://quux.org/devel/hpodder
* hmp3 1.1 . Don Stewart [10]announced a new release of hmp3, the
curses-based mp3 player written in Haskell. Release 1.1 is a
maintenance release, fixing support for GHC 6.4.2
10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13864
* HSP.Clientside 0.001 . Joel Bjornson [11]announced a prerelease
version of Hsp.Clientside. This is Joel's [12]Summer of Code
project aiming to add support for client-side script generation in
Haskell Server Pages. The basic building blocks for embedding
Javascript has been implemented. As the project proceeds a
suitable programming model based on these components will be
added. Hopefully this will also include some kind of higher level
Ajax support. For more information see [13]here.
11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13851
12. http://code.google.com/soc/haskell/about.html
13. http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~bjornson/soc
* QDBM and Hyper Estraier bindings . Jun Mukai [14]released a
library of bindings to Quick DBM, a database module similar to
GDBM, Berkeley-DB, optimized for performance and a simple API.
Additionally, Jun's code includes support for Hyper Estraier, a
full-text search system using QDBM, with the ability to search
documents according to keywords.
14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4821
* Streams 0.2 . Bulat Ziganshin [15]announced the beta release of
his Streams 0.2 library, providing fast string and binary IO, now
with Data.ByteString support.
15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4820
* HNOP 0.1 . Ashley Yakeley [16]released the first version of HNOP
0.1. HNOP does nothing. This version should be considered "beta"
quality.
16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13881
* HList updates . Oleg Kiselyov [17]announced that HList, the
library for strongly typed heterogeneous lists, records,
type-indexed products (TIP) and co-products is now accessible via
darcs, [18]here. Additionally, Oleg pointed to some new features
for HList, including a new representation for open records.
Finally, he [19]published a note on how HList supports, natively,
polymorphic variants: extensible recursive open sum datatypes,
quite similar to Polymorphic variants of OCaml. HList thus solves
the `expression problem' -- the ability to add new variants to a
datatype without changing the existing code.
17. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13905
18. http://darcs.haskell.org/HList/
19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13906
* Haskell IO Inside . Bulat Ziganshin [20]wrote a new introductory
tutorial to IO in Haskell, [21]Down the Rabbit's Hole.
20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/13409
21. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/IO_inside
* Bytecode API 0.2 . Robert Dockins [22]published the Yhc Bytecode
API version 0.2. More details [23]here.
22. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.yhc/146
23. http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/~rdocki01/yhc-bytecode.html
* Translating Haskell into English . Shannon Behrens [24]published a
new Haskell tutorial, hoping to give readers a glimpse of the Zen
of Haskell, without requiring that they already be Haskell
converts.
24. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9096
Haskell'
This section covers the [25]Haskell' standardisation process.
* [26]Nested Guards
25. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
26. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1561/focus=1561
Discussion
* Haskell and the Great Language Shootout, reloaded . Simon Marlow
[27]highlighted some remarks and discussion from Brent Fulgham,
the driving force behind the [28]Great Language Shootout on the
impact recent advances in the performance of GHC have had. In
particular, many benchmarks had to be rewritten due to the
performance advantage lazy Haskell programs had over strict (and
wasteful) entries in other languages. Brent noted that
"applications written in Haskell can be reasonably expected to
yield good performance on all of the common x86 platforms without
customizations". This in turn led to a discussion about further
improvements we can expect to see in GHC Haskell over the next few
months.
27. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13857/focus=13857
28. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
* HNOP, doing nothing, and really complex ways of doing nothing .
Ashley Yakeley [29]forked a somewhat surreal thread regarding
Haskell programs that do nothing.
29. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13881/focus=13881
Quotes of the Week
* Brian Hulley : "It is definitely *a* haskell. There is actually no
word in English with a silent 'h', though this statement is
unfortunately controversial and news to whoever wrote the spell
checker used in many printed publications. Of course some
particular dialects use different pronunciation like 'me 'otel
room 'ad an 'askell 'mpiler in t' closet as well as tub 'n sink
tha knows'"
Code Watch
Thu Jun 29 06:58:36 PDT 2006 Simon Marlow
* No longer force -fvia-C for the RTS, it can now be compiled with the NCG
Sat Jul 1 01:43:45 PDT 2006 Don Stewart
* Import Data.ByteString.Lazy, improve ByteString Fusion, and resync with
FPS head
This patch imports the Data.ByteString.Lazy module, and its
helpers, providing a ByteString implemented as a lazy list
of strict cache-sized chunks. This type allows the usual
lazy operations to be written on bytestrings, including
lazy IO, with much improved space and time over the [Char]
equivalents.
Contributing to HWN
To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
[30]contributing information. Send stories to dons at cse.unsw.edu.au.
The darcs repository is available at
darcs get http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/hwn
30. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
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