[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: Generic Haskell 1.80 (Emerald)

[Thomas van Noort]

             Generic Haskell version 1.80 (Emerald)
             ======================================

We are happy to announce the fifth release of Generic Haskell,
an extension of Haskell that facilitates generic programming.

Generic Haskell includes the following features:

* type-indexed values -- generic functions that can be
   instantiated on all Haskell data types.

* type-indexed types -- types which are indexed over the type
   constructors underlying Haskell datatypes.

The Generic Haskell compiler takes Generic Haskell source
and produces Haskell code.


Changes since 1.62 (Diamond)
----------------------------

* Generic views for generic types [1] are now supported.

* The implementation of type-indexed types is improved.


Download
--------

The Generic Haskell compiler is available in source and binary
distributions. Binaries for Linux, Windows, and MacOSX
are available. These are available from:

     http://www.generic-haskell.org/compiler.html

The documentation is also available separately from that page.

For more general information, point your browser to:

     http://www.generic-haskell.org


Why Generic Haskell?
--------------------

Software development often consists of designing datatypes, around which
functionality is added.  Some functionality is datatype
specific, whereas other functionality is defined on almost all
datatypes in such a way that it depends only on the structure of the
datatype.  A function that works on many datatypes in this way
is called a generic function.  Examples of generic functionality
include editing, pretty-printing or storing a value in a database, and
comparing two values for equality.

Since datatypes often change and new datatypes are introduced, we
have developed Generic Haskell, an extension of the functional
programming language Haskell that supports generic definitions,
to save the programmer from (re)writing instances of generic
functions. The original design of Generic Haskell is based on work by Ralf
Hinze.

   Pleasant programming,
   The Generic Haskell Team at Utrecht University

   info at generic-haskell.org

[1] Thomas van Noort. Generic views for generic types. Master's thesis,
Utrecht University, 2008.