[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: October 19, 2006
Donald Bruce Stewart
dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
Thu Oct 19 04:19:42 EDT 2006
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haskell Weekly News
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
Issue 45 - October 19, 2006
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to issue 45 of HWN, a weekly newsletter covering developments
in the Haskell community.
A big week, with a swag of new releases, including the long awaited
GHC 6.6.
Announcements
* GHC version 6.6. The GHC Team [1]announced a new release of GHC!
There have been many changes since the 6.4.2 release. For details,
see [2]the release notes. Binary builds, source and packages are
all found at [3]GHC's home.
1. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14367/
2. http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.6/html/users_guide/release-6-6.html
3. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/
* Haddock version 0.8. Simon Marlow [4]announced Haddock 0.8,
including: cabalisation, Hoogle support, image inclusion. [5]Read
more.
4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14358/
5. http://www.haskell.org/haddock
* Pugs 6.2.13 released. Audrey Tang [6]announced that after nearly
four months of development and 3400+ commits, [7]Pugs 6.2.13, the
leading Perl6 implementation written in Haskell, is now available.
6. http://pugs.blogs.com/pugs/2006/10/pugs_6213_relea.html
7. http://pugscode.org/
* STM invariants and exceptions. Tim Harris [8]announced that new
transactional memory features have been committed to GHC. The main
change is to add support for dynamically checked data invariants
of the kind described in [9]this paper (pdf). There are two
operations: always X :: STM Bool -> STM () and alwaysSucceeds X ::
STM a -> STM (). More details in [10]here (pdf).
8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14356/
9. http://research.microsoft.com/~tharris/papers/2006-transact.pdf
10. http://research.microsoft.com/~tharris/papers/2005-ppopp-composable.pdf
* Cabal version 1.1.6 is now available. Duncan Coutts [11]announced
that [12]Cabal, the common architecture for building applications
and libraries, version 1.1.6 is now available. It is included in
GHC version 6.6.
11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/5228/
12. http://haskell.org/cabal/
* Fun in the Afternoon: Thurs 16th Nov in Oxford. Jeremy Gibbons
[13]announced that he, Graham Hutton and Conor McBride at
Nottingham are organizing a seminar, [14]Fun in the Afternoon, on
functional programming and related topics. The idea is to have a
small number of talks as an antidote to mid-term blues, three
afternoons a year. The hope is that talks will be informal and
fun, and that there will be plenty of scope for discussion and
chat as well. Looks fun!
13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14373/
14. http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fun/
* HC&A Call for Contributions. Andres Loeh [15]asked for
contributions towards the 11th [16]Haskell Communities &
Activities Report, a bi-annual overview of the state of Haskell as
well as Haskell-related projects of all flavours.
15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14384/
16. http://www.haskell.org/communities/
* Generic Haskell version 1.60 (Diamond). Utrecht's Generic Haskell
Team [17]announced a new release of [18]Generic Haskell, an
extension of Haskell that facilitates generic programming. Generic
Haskell includes: type-indexed values and type-indexed types. The
Generic Haskell compiler takes Generic Haskell source and produces
Haskell code. This release adds support for Generic Views.
17. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14374/
18. http://www.generic-haskell.org/
* Streams 0.1 available for GHC 6.6. Bulat Ziganshin [19]announced
that the Streams 0.1 library is now compatible GHC 6.6.
19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14383/
Haskell'
This section covers the [20]Haskell' standardisation process.
* [21](Pattern) Guards in lambdas
20. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
21. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1750/focus=1750
Discussion
* GADT terminology. Oleg Kiselyov [22]argued that the term GADT
should be reserved for truly generalised algebraic data types, and
not just normal data types written in GADT syntax.
22. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14363/focus=14363
* Extended functionality for record field accessors. Henning
Thielemann [23]proposed some record system extensions.
23. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/15944/
Jobs
* Senior Back-end Web Application Developer. Lime Wire. [24]PhD a
plus, extra credit for knowing Haskell.
24. http://www.crunchboard.com/job/1138
Blog noise
[25]Haskell news from the blogosphere.
* [26]First Steps with Haskell for Web Applications
* [27]Haskell and Personal Publishing Platform Ramblings
* [28]A type-based solution to the 'strings problem'
* [29]5 Principles For Programming
* [30]The Misguided Faith in Unit Tests
* [31]The functional language that?s right under your nose
* [32]Games, Strategies and the Self-Composition of the List Monad
* [33]Flapjax - Functional Reactive Ajax
* [34]Haskell-style parser combinators in Factor: s-expression reader
* [35]Concepts behind the C# 3.0 language
* [36]Explicit Typing, Trail Blazing, and Packrat Parsing
* [37]What is so cool about Functional Programming?
25. http://planet.haskell.org/
26. http://mult.ifario.us/articles/2006/10/11/first-steps-with-haskell-for-web-applications
27. http://mult.ifario.us/articles/2006/10/18/more-haskell-and-personal-publishing-platform-ramblings
28. http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2006/10/18/a-type-based-solution-to-the-strings-problem
29. http://empathybox.com/archives/8
30. http://blogs.concedere.net:8080/blog/discipline/software+engineering/?permalink=The-Misguided-Faith-in-Unit-Tests.html
31. http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2006/10/11/functional-language-s-right-under-your-nose
32. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2006/10/games-strategies-and-self-composition.html
33. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1771
34. http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2006/10/factor-parser-combinator-example.html
35. http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/csharp3-concepts.asp
36. http://www.knowing.net/PermaLink,guid,0cc63c2f-e167-406d-a00e-4f390e9494f6.aspx
37. http://www.gaetanocaruana.com/2006/10/02/what-is-so-cool-about-functional-programming/
Quotes of the Week
* M. David Peterson : With the help of our friendly local
ex-professors and Haskell geeks Dr. Meijer and Dr. Lämmel, I have
learned to stop worrying and love monad comprehensions
* SamB: O(n^2) is better than O(hair-gone)
* chessguy: I didn't think Pennsylvania had anybody cool enough to
know Haskell in it
* int-e: What, unsafeCoerce# is kind-preserving? How boring!
* lennart: Floating point numbers are terrible. I maintain that
before using them people should have an floating point drivers
license
* xerox: #haskell is a good code optimizer.
* sigfpe: Haskell is so strict about type safety that randomly
generated snippets of code that successfully typecheck are likely
to do something useful, even if you've no idea what that useful
thing is.
About the Haskell Weekly News
Each week, new editions are posted to [38]the Haskell mailing list as
well as to [39]the Haskell Sequence and [40]Planet Haskell. [41]RSS is
also available, and headlines appear on [42]haskell.org.
The Haskell Weekly News is also [43]available in Spanish translation.
To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
[44]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
38. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
39. http://sequence.complete.org/
40. http://planet.haskell.org/
41. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
42. http://haskell.org/
43. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN/es
44. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
More information about the Haskell
mailing list