[Haskell-cafe] IRC Statistics

[Vlad Dogaru]

Hello,

as part of an effort to learn Haskell, me and a few friends want to 
write an IRC statistcs generator. It would analyse logs and output HTML, 
text, or whatever other format. However, I have a few questions; we're 
all pretty new to this and it would be a shame to start off terribly 
wrong and get bored before we get to the fun parts.

1. Is there a similar effort in Haskell? I've seen a truly awesome 
IRCStats, but written in C (not that that's a bad thing).

2. I was thinking of the following structure:
   * a uniform Event format: joins, parts, actions, normal lines, and 
everything about them: the user, date and time, etc.
   * functions that parse logs to a list of events. Exotic log format? 
Just write a different function! (whatever `exotic' may mean)
   * functions that do various statistics on a list of events. The 
output will not be uniform. Examples are: who spoke most, what time 
people speak most, etc.
   * some way to make these into a common output form, maybe every above 
module having two functions, one for `internal' format, and one for 
converting that to proper output.

Now, there will probably be a lot of opportunities to ask for feedback 
on possible statistics and log formats. My (main) question is whether 
you see anything conceptually wrong in this approach.

With a bit of luck, we will be announcing hirst-0.1 in a few weeks or 
months (we're doing this while having schoool and other engagements).

Thank you for your time,

Vlad

PS: This is my first post here, please point out any inadequacy.
-- 
There is nothing more dangerous than an
idea when it is the only one you have.