[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 84 - September 6, 2008

Brent Yorgey byorgey at seas.upenn.edu
Sat Sep 6 16:29:27 EDT 2008 

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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080906
Issue 84 - September 06, 2008
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   Welcome to issue 84 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

   This is the "This issue is not late since the HWN will henceforth be
   published on Saturday now that I have real work to do" edition.
   Featured this week: darcs hacking sprint plans solidify, xmonad 0.8
   released, typed sprintf and sscanf, and tons of discussion about
   everything from functional references to splitting up the base library
   to the future direction of Haskell.

Announcements

   unicode-properties 3.2.0.0, unicode-names 3.2.0.0. Ashley Yakeley
   [2]announced the release of the [3]unicode-properties 3.2.0.0 and
   [4]unicode-names 3.2.0.0 packages, which are representations in
   Haskell of various data in the Unicode 3.2.0 Character Database.

   experimental static blog engine in Haskell. jinjing [5]announced the
   initial release of [6]Panda, an experimental static blog engine written
   in Haskell.

   darcs hacking sprint, venues confirmed! (25-26 October). Eric Y. Kow
   [7]announced that two venues (Brighton, UK and Portland, Oregon, USA)
   have been confirmed for the [8]darcs hacking sprint on 25-26 October.

   darcs weekly news #2. Eric Y. Kow The second weekly issue of the
   [9]darcs weekly news has been published.

   xmonad 0.8 released!. Don Stewart [10]announced the release of
   [11]xmonad 0.8, featuring a general purpose "gaps" replacement, locale
   support, the ability to create your own configuration parsers, and
   various other [12]enhancements and fixes.

   POPL logo design contest. Don Stewart [13]forwarded a message
   announcing a logo design contest for POPL 2009. Dust off your magic
   markers/photoshop skills and get designing!

   ICFP09 Announcement. Matthew Fluet [14]announced [15]ICFP 2009, to be
   held 31st August to 2nd September 2009 in Edinburgh. ICFP provides a
   forum for researchers and developers to hear about the latest work on
   the design, implementations, principles, and uses of functional
   programming.

   Fast parallel binary-trees for the shootout:
   Control.Parallel.Strategies FTW!. Don Stewart [16]announced that the
   Computer Language Shootout recently got a quad core 64 bit machine, and
   outlined a plan and some initial results for porting the Haskell
   entries to take advantage of the available parallelism.

   The initial view on typed sprintf and sscanf. oleg [17]announced an
   implementation of typed sprintf and sscanf functions sharing the same
   formatting specifications, which also led to some interesting
   discussion and alternative proposals.

Discussion

   Generalize groupBy in a useful way?. Bart Massey [18]proposed changing
   the implementation of groupBy to extend its usefulness for predicates
   which are not equivalence relations.

   Splitting SYB from the base package in GHC 6.10. José Pedro Magalhães
   [19]initiated a discussion regarding splitting the SYB libraries out of
   the base package for GHC 6.10.

   The base library and GHC 6.10. Ian Lynagh initiated a [20]discussion on
   further splitting up the base package for GHC 6.10.

   Functional references. Tim Newsham began a [21]discussion on functional
   references and the possibility of merging the existing four or five
   implementations into something more standard.

   Types and Trees. Matt Morrow [22]wrote something about types and type
   representations, involving some commutative diagrams and some code. I
   haven't read it yet but it looks neat!

   Research language vs. professional language. Ryan Ingram started an
   interesting [23]discussion on the future direction(s) of the Haskell
   language.

   language proposal: ad-hoc overloading. Ryan Ingram [24]proposed adding
   ad-hoc name overloading to Haskell, prompting quite a bit of
   discussion.

   Top Level <-. Ashley Yakeley originally [25]asked whether there is any
   interest in implementing a top level "<-" to run monadic code. This set
   off a cascade of discussion the likes of which have been rarely seen on
   the Cafe. I would tell you what the discussion has been about but I
   must confess that I haven't read it.

Blog noise

   [26]Haskell news from the [27]blogosphere.
     * Eric Kow (kowey): [28]darcs hacking sprint (25-26 October 2008).
     * Magnus Therning: [29]Confusion with HaskellDB.
     * Xmonad: [30]xmonad 0.8 released!.
     * Real-World Haskell: [31]Speaking in Silicon Valley next week.
     * Luke Palmer: [32]Composable Input for Fruit.
     * Luke Palmer: [33]Slicing open the belly of the IO monad in an
       alternate universe.
     * "FP Lunch": [34]Modular Monad Transformers.
     * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [35]Fuzzy unification parser in
       Haskell.
     * Bjoern Edstroem: [36]Speeding up Haskell with C -- a very short
       introduction.
     * Eric Kow (kowey): [37]darcs weekly news #2.
     * Roman Cheplyaka: [38]Physics and polyhedra.
     * Well-Typed.Com: [39]The new haskell.org community SPARC server is
       online.
     * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [40]A stream of primes as Comonad.
     * Eric Kidd: [41]Ubiquitous Hoogle. Eric shows how to integrate a
       [42]Hoogle search command into [43]Ubiquity.
     * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [44]Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part
       3. The vector space monad and rational tangles.

Quotes of the Week

     * dons: maybe we should do a "recommend RWH to a java programmer"
       campaign :)
     * gwern: we fill fight them in the registers, we will fight them in
       the caches; we shall fight them in the core, and even in the
       backing store. And we shall never surrender!

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [45]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [46]the Haskell Sequence and [47]Planet Haskell. [48]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [49]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [50]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [51]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9973
   3. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/unicode-properties
   4. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/unicode-names
   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44181
   6. http://jinjing.blog.easymic.com/
   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44164
   8. http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/Sprints
   9. http://code.haskell.org/darcs/darcs-news
  10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44157
  11. http://xmonad.org/
  12. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Notable_changes_since_0.7
  13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44069
  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16413
  15. http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/icfp09.html
  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43968
  17. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16405
  18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/10016
  19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9962
  20. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9929
  21. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44098
  22. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44028
  23. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43933
  24. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43897
  25. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16393
  26. http://planet.haskell.org/
  27. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  28. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/09/darcs-hacking-sprint-25-26-october-2008.html
  29. http://therning.org/magnus/archives/375
  30. http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2008/09/05/xmonad-08-released/
  31. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/09/05/speaking-in-silicon-valley-next-week/
  32. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/08/09/composable-input-for-fruit/
  33. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/08/14/slicing-open-the-belly-of-the-io-monad-in-an-alternate-universe/
  34. http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fplunch/weblog/?p=111
  35. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/09/fuzzy-unification-parser-in-haskell.html
  36. http://blog.bjrn.se/2008/09/speeding-up-haskell-with-c-very-short.html
  37. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/09/darcs-weekly-news-2.html
  38. http://physics-dph.blogspot.com/2008/08/physics-and-polyhedra.html
  39. http://blog.well-typed.com/2008/09/the-new-haskellorg-community-sparc-server-is-online/
  40. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/09/stream-of-primes-as-comonad.html
  41. http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2008/09/01/ubiquitous-hoogle
  42. http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/
  43. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity
  44. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/08/untangling-with-continued-fractions_31.html
  45. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  46. http://sequence.complete.org/
  47. http://planet.haskell.org/
  48. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  49. http://haskell.org/
  50. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  51. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/

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