[Haskell-cafe] GSoC proposal: Units for GHC

[Gregory Collins]

Hi,

I don't see any mention here of the dimensional library (
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/dimensional), or its type-family variant
--- in order to be a viable proposal you should describe how you would
improve on the approach taken there.

G

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Nils Schweinsberg <ml at n-sch.de> wrote:

> Hi Haskell-Cafe & GHC-users!
>
> I'm looking to apply for the GSoC and since I've worked on GHC before I'd
> like to continue to do so. My proposal would be something that tempted me
> (as a physics student) for a while: Units for Haskell/GHC.
>
> This project has been suggested for a long time on the GHC wiki, and there
> is already a lot of work done for other languages like ML, F# etc[1]. I
> have tried to implement e.g. the unification algorithm from the "Types for
> Units-of-Measure in F#" talk[2] for an abstract syntax tree[3] and it was
> pretty much straight forward. As I see it, the project would consist of:
>
>  1.) Find appropriate rules/algorithms for unit analysis. Most (if not
> all?) of this should be covered in those papers/talks on [1].
>
>  2.) Applying the rules to the Haskell syntax tree used in GHC.
>
> I have approximately 3 years of experience with Haskell, I worked for the
> database research group[4] at the University of Tübingen (Germany) on the
> Database Supported Haskell[5] library. I've done most of the coding for the
> monad comprehension[6] extension, which has been added to the latest GHC
> release version. I'm already quite familiar with the GHC internals of the
> compiler/typechecker, and even though I'd have to look up how exactly type
> interference etc. works in GHC (as I've only *used* it, but never tried to
> understand/modify it) I'm confident that the work on GHC itself should be
> doable in the given timeframe.
>
> So my questions would be:
>
> Do you think this is a appropriate GSoC project?
> What should I include in the application/project proposal?
> Anything else? Opinions, suggestions?
>
> I realize that I'm kind of late and probably should have written this
> email a long time ago. But there are still 2 days left for the student
> application and hopefully I'll get some good feedback by then.
>
>
>
> - Nils
>
>
>
> [1]: http://research.microsoft.com/**en-us/um/people/akenn/units/**
> index.html<http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/akenn/units/index.html>
> [2]: http://research.microsoft.com/**en-us/um/people/akenn/units/**
> MLWorkshop2008.pdf<http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/akenn/units/MLWorkshop2008.pdf>
> [3]: https://github.com/mcmaniac/**units/blob/master/src/**Unification.hs<https://github.com/mcmaniac/units/blob/master/src/Unification.hs>
> [4]: http://db.inf.uni-tuebingen.**de/team<http://db.inf.uni-tuebingen.de/team>
> [5]: http://hackage.haskell.org/**package/DSH<http://hackage.haskell.org/package/DSH>
> [6]: http://db.inf.uni-tuebingen.**de/files/giorgidze/**haskell2011.pdf<http://db.inf.uni-tuebingen.de/files/giorgidze/haskell2011.pdf>
>
> ______________________________**_________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/**mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe<http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe>
>



-- 
Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20120404/4909eb4a/attachment.htm>