[Haskell-cafe] ANN: logfloat 0.13.3

[wren romano]

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-- logfloat 0.13.3
--------------------------------------------

This package provides a type for storing numbers in the log-domain,
primarily useful for preventing underflow when multiplying many
probabilities as in HMMs and other probabilistic models. The package
also provides modules for dealing with floating numbers correctly.

This version drops support for Hugs and GHC < 7.8. Nothing major has
changed, so they should still work; it's just that they're no longer
officially supported. Thus, this version of the library provides a
transitional point between backwards compatability and adding new
features (see below).

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-- Changes since 0.12.1 (2010-03-19)
--------------------------------------------

* Monomorphized logFloat, logToLogFloat, fromLogFloat, and
logFromLogFloat: that is, they all take/return Double now. The change
was made to help reduce the need for explicit type signatures. It
shouldn't really affect most users, since it seems noone was really
making use of the polymorphism provided by previous versions. To get
the previous behavior back, just explicitly add calls to realToFrac
wherever necessary.

* Fixed some instances to get them to compile under the new role-based
type system of GHC 7.10

* Cleaned up various extraneous rewrite rules, specializations, etc

* Added the functions sum, product, and pow. Both sum and product
preserve more precision than the fold-based definitions in the
Prelude. Moreover, sum is _much_ faster than the Prelude version,
since it only requires crossing the log/exp boundary n+1 times,
instead of 2*(n-1) times. The only downside is that sum requires two
passes over the input and thus is not amenable to list fusion.

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-- Upcoming changes (0.14+)
--------------------------------------------

* Since the Data.Number.RealToFrac module is no longer required by any
of the others, it will probably be forked off to a separate package in
order to improve portability of the rest of the package by removing
the need for MPTCs.

* There's long been clamoring for adding a
vector:Data.Vector.Unboxed.Unbox instance. I've been reluctant to add
such an instance due to wanting to retain backwards compatibility and
portability. Having dropped support for Hugs and older versions of
GHC, I'm now willing to add them in.

The logfloat library is conceptually quite simple, and thus to
whatever extent possible I'd still like to retain portability to
non-GHC compilers. So if you are interested in using logfloat with
another compiler/interpreter but run into problems (e.g., due to the
type families required by the vector library), please get in touch and
I'll try to get things to work.


--------------------------------------------
-- Compatibility / Portability
--------------------------------------------

The package is compatible with GHC 7.8.3 and 7.10.1. It may still
compile with older versions of GHC (or even Hugs!), however they are
no longer officially supported.

The package is not compatible with nhc98 and Yhc because
Data.Number.RealToFrac uses MPTCs. However, that module is no longer
required by any others, and all the other modules should be compatible
with these compilers. Thus, it should be fairly easy to port. If you
do so, please let me know and I'll try to incorporate support for
them.


--------------------------------------------
-- Links
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Homepage:
     http://code.haskell.org/~wren/

Hackage:
     http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/logfloat

Darcs:
     http://code.haskell.org/~wren/logfloat/

Haddock (Darcs version):
     http://code.haskell.org/~wren/logfloat/dist/doc/html/logfloat/

-- 
Live well,
~wren