[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: HOC (Haskell to Objective-C Binding) 0.7

[André Pang]

About HOC
=========

HOC is a Haskell to Objective-C binding.  In a nutshell, it enables you 
to use Objective-C objects and frameworks from Haskell, and also 
enables you to write Objective-C objects in Haskell.  You can write 
full-blown applications in HOC and use all of the Foundation, AppKit 
and Cocoa frameworks' classes (including all of the AppKit's GUI 
objects), combining Objective-C tools such as Mac OS X's Interface 
Builder to build the GUI graphically while writing controllers for the 
GUI in Haskell.  You can even mix and match custom objects written in 
Objective-C with objects written in Haskell, depending on which 
language you find more suitable for the task.  HOC comes some sample 
GUI programs: you can find screenshots of these HOC programs at 
<http://hoc.sourceforge.net/screenshots/>.

The Haskell interfaces produced by HOC are strongly typed (Objective-C 
classes are mapped to Haskell's typed system), can be automatically 
generated from Objective-C header files, and are designed to integrate 
well with existing Haskell code, taking advantage of features such as 
type classes and partial application to make its Haskell API as easy to 
use and as "Haskell-like" as possible.  HOC's primary platform is Mac 
OS X, although it has been lightly tested with the free GNUstep 
platform on Linux.  HOC requires the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) 6.2 
or later.

Note: If you have heard of a Haskell to Objective-C binding named 
Mocha, HOC is effectively a working version of Mocha, which was never 
completed due to time constraints.  A previous version of HOC (0.1) was 
mentioned briefly on the glasgow-haskell-users mailing list on January 
2003, but is a very different beast to the current incarnation: HOC 0.1 
was more of an experiment with Template Haskell than a serious 
implementation.  Wolfgang Thaller, the primary author of HOC, has 
collaborated greatly with Andre Pang, who was the primary author of 
Mocha, to forge a new HOC that we hope you will find achieves all the 
ambitious goals that Mocha strived for, and more.  Mocha is dead, long 
live HOC!

More information on HOC (including where you can download it!) is 
available on its homepage, at:

     http://hoc.sourceforge.net/


Authors
=======

Wolfgang Thaller <wolfgang.thaller at gmx.net>
Andre Pang <ozone at algorithm.com.au>

Enjoy!


-- 
% Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save