[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: Galois web libraries for Haskell released

[Andrew Coppin]

Don Stewart wrote:
>   * utf8-string
>         A UTF8 layer for IO and Strings. The utf8-string
>         package provides operations for encoding UTF8
>         strings to Word8 lists and back, and for reading and
>         writing UTF8 without truncation.        
>
>         http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/utf8-string
>   

When I read this, my first thought was "but does it support 
ByteStrings?" Apparently that's a "yes"... yay!

> About:
>
> Galois <http://galois.com> researches, designs and develops high
> assurance technologies for security-critical systems, networks and
> applications. We use Haskell as a primary development tool for producing
> robust components for a diverse range of clients.
>   

You know, this has been puzzling me for ages. Everybody round here seems 
to "know" who or what Galois is, except me. So now I know!

> Web-based technologies are increasingly important in this area, and we
> believe Haskell has a key role to play in the production of reliable,
> secure web software. The culture of correctness Haskell encourages is
> ideally suited to web programming, where issues of security,
> authentication, privacy and protection of resources abound.  In
> particular, Haskell's type system makes possible strong static
> guarantees about access to resources, critical to building reliable web
> applications. We hope that the release of this suite of libraries to the
> community will push further the adoption of Haskell in the domain of web
> programming.

Well, all of that is true of course... but given that most people 
percieve I/O as being "hard" in Haskell, it seems like an interesting 
target. But hey, here's to success!