[Haskell-cafe] ANN: diagrams 0.4

[Brent Yorgey]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 08:21:30AM +0530, Rustom Mody wrote:
> Thanks.  This is attractive.
> I remember (vaguely) a 'live page' ie where one could enter (into the
> browser) changes to the diagrams code and see the results immediately.
> Is that page there? (Or am I mixing up with something else?)

You might also have been thinking of Luite Stegeman's "Wolfgang
Lambda" project, which supports diagrams in this way (as well as many
other things!).  There was an early preview version of it up for a
little while which a bunch of people saw, but it's not ready for
release yet.

> How does diagrams compare with graphviz?  If this is an inappropriate
> (type-wrong?) question thats ok :-)  Its just that when I last looked at
> graphviz I found the documentation somewhat impenetrable -- like much else
> in Hackage -- lots of types, no examples.

graphviz is a special-purpose tool for doing graph layout and
visualization.  diagrams is a general-purpose framework for drawing
anything at all.  As for documentation, you do realize that the graphviz
package on Hackage is a set of bindings? So there's a lot of helpful
documentation at http://www.graphviz.org/ .

One of my goals with diagrams is to have excellent documentation, so
if you find anything that is unclear or poorly documented, please file
a bug report (http://code.google.com/p/diagrams/issues/list)!

-Brent