[Haskell-cafe] An idea - Feasibility and effort

[Vimal]

Hi Haskellers,

This semester, I am having a software engineering course. I always
wanted to do something significant in Haskell. This is probably an
opportunity that I can utilize.

I have the following ideas, with inspiration from various sources.
Please let me know your views/ideas on them. If you feel you are
experienced enough, do warn me if the idea might not be feasible to
implement! I will have about half a month for getting the Software
Requirement Specification ready, and ~ 1 month of time for coding.

Idea 1:
A Traceroute visualizer.

I saw the video on the London Haskell Group on how to create a game in
Haskell, and loved the "rotating earth" part of the game. (Space
Invaders or something like that). Combine the earth (with a Google
earth touch) with a traceroute backend and animate packet routing via
different cities live on the screen.

I like this idea. More of a fun project than a useful one. Probably
Haskell isnt a good language to implement it, but as they say, one
should never think about moulding a project to suit the language you
code in.


Idea 2:
A module that generates optimum (in some sense) set of instructions
for a given (pure, functional) expression.

So, this basically involves concepts like
* avoiding recalculating common subexpressions (expression-tree matching?),
* register allocation (assuming a finite supply of registers, modeling
as graph colouring),
* Term rewriting

I am just quoting some terms there, I may be wrong. but this might be
a project that Haskell might help me beautifully model and execute.


I would like to have some opinion on the complexity of the project
ideas that I have in mind.

Thanks,
-- 
Vimal
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Chennai
India