ANNOUNCE: hat-2.02

[Malcolm Wallace]

				hat-2.02
				--------
			http://www.haskell.org/hat/

We are pleased to announce a new release of Hat, the Haskell Tracer.
Hat is a very useful tool for understanding and debugging programs.
Hat is compiler independent, and can be used on any Unix-like platform.

This new release, hat-2.02, can be used with the compilers ghc-5.04.2,
nhc98-1.16, upwards.  Particular features of note in this release are:

  * Support for hierarchical module namespaces.
    (The Hat distribution also includes a tracing version of a subset
    of the base package of standard hierarchical libraries.)

  * Support for common type-system extensions (if your compiler also
    supports them.  These include: multi-parameter type classes,
    functional dependencies, and existential quantification of datatype
    declarations.

  * A significant speed improvement (20-40%) of traced programs over the
    previous release.  (Plus, if you build Hat with ghc -O, you can
    get another 20-40% performance boost.)

  * We believe Hat now works under Windows (provided you have Cygwin,
    and some of the X toolset - please check the requirements listed on
    the website carefully).  It continues to work under MacOS-X as well
    (provided you have Apple's X toolset).

There are also lots of more minor improvements in the viewing tools.
For instance:

  * The viewers now support qualified name syntax.
  * Named field constructions and updates are now displayed correctly.
  * List sugaring is fixed.
  * Large expressions that scroll off the display are now fixed.
  * Lots of other small bugfixes.

See the website
    http://www.haskell.org/hat/
for full details.  There is a dedicated mailing list for bug-reports
and other discussion of Hat:
    http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/hat


Regards,
    The Hat team at York

[ The Hat team consists of Malcolm Wallace, Olaf Chitil, and Colin Runciman,
  with thanks to many other students, visitors, collaborators and reviewers.
  The development of Hat was funded by EPSRC grant number GR/M81953,
  and the latest release was partially supported by the University of York
  and Microsoft Research (Cambridge).
]