[Hs-Generics] Experiments and paper

[Johan Jeuring]

Dear generics-subscribers,

We intend to develop a common library for generic programming. A  
first step towards such a design is to evaluate the existing  
approaches. We started on this last year, but activities slowed down  
a bit, presumably due to other obligations. Since January, Alex  
Gerdes and Alexey have picked up the evaluation again. Some of you  
might have followed the darcs submissions of Alexey and Alex in the  
last couple of months: we have implemented a set of examples for  
almost all library approaches now. A few approaches remain to be  
done, but we can hopefully do so in the next couple of weeks.  We  
hope you can have a look at the implementations, or maybe at the  
implementation of the examples in your favourite approach. The  
implementations of the examples can be obtained via

darcs get http://www.cs.uu.nl/~alexey/repos/generics/

We are planning to push these patches to the haskell.org darcs  
repository http://darcs.haskell.org/generics in the coming days,  
would that be a problem for any of you? We will push the code under a  
different directory called `comparison', so none of the existing  
files will be affected.

We noticed that some of the pages on the haskell wiki about the  
libraries have disappeared after restructuring the libraries and  
tools pages. We've restored them.

We're thinking about writing a paper for the Haskell Workshop  
describing our evaluations. The deadline for the HW is June 15, so  
that gives us a bit more than a month. Some of you contributed to the  
stuff that is on the webpage, or in the repository. So we can imagine  
some of you would like to coauthor such a paper. Please let us know  
if that is the case, so that we can give you permissions for the svn  
repository for the paper (which at the moment is almost empty).

All the best,

Johan