[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: September 13, 2005

[John Goerzen]

                    Haskell Weekly News: September 13, 2005

   Greetings, and thanks for reading the seventh issue of HWN, a weekly
   newsletter for the Haskell community. Each Tuesday, new editions will be
   posted (as text) to [1]the Haskell mailing list and (as HTML) to [2]The
   Haskell Sequence.

   1. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
   2. http://sequence.complete.org/

New Releases

     * CabalFind 0.1. Dimitry Golubovsky [3]announced CabalFind 0.1, an
       interface to search engines such as Google and Yahoo designed to help
       find Cabalized packages out on the Internet.

   3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8214

     * gtk2hs with Cairo. Duncan Coutts [4]announced a special release of
       gtk2hs as a "tech preview" of the included Cairo bindings. Some
       impressive screenshots are in there as well.

   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12082

     * OOHaskell. Ralf Laemmel and Olaf Kiselyov [5]announced a new version
       of their paper, "Haskell's overlooked object system" and its
       accompanying library.

   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12077

     * StringMap. Adrian Hey [6]announced his new module, Data.StringMap,
       which provides mapes from String keys to arbitrary values.

   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12104

     * AVL 2.3. Adrian Hey [7]announced version 2.3 of his Data.Tree.AVL
       library, adding a few new features and a bit of renaming.

   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3714

Discussion

   Why is HWN a day late this week? Your HWN editor was stuck in some large
   airports that had a [8]surprising lack of Wifi. Sigh.

   8. http://changelog.complete.org/node/388

   Binary parser combinators. Einar Karttunen [9]asked about a binary parser
   combinator interface for network protocol parsing. Malcolm Wallac pointed
   out that nhc98 has a Binary library with a "<<" operator that could be
   useful.

   9. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8256

   Windows programming in Haskell. Brian McQueen [10]asked about Windows
   programming in Haskell, including access to the Windows registry, APIs,
   and communicating with other Windows apps. Several suggestions relating to
   Hugs were offered, including .NET support and some libraries.

  10. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8221

   Functional vs. Imperative. Dhaemon began an [11]interesting discussion by
   asking for some help understanding functional vs. imperative approaches.
   Several people commented on the IO monad, and how it is still a functional
   interface even though it may appear imperative at first glance.

  11. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8254

   Mixing monadic and non-monadic functions. A long [12]thread on this
   subject appeared in the Haskell list this week. Rather too long to
   summarize here -- take a look at the link.

  12. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12077

   Language workbenches. Yoel Jacobsen [13]wrote about an article on language
   workbenches, in which configuration files are actually valid code in a
   general-purpose language. Yoel went on to ask about doing this in Haskell.
   Some suggestions, such as hs-plugins, were offered.

  13. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8227

   Types in Template Haskell. Gracjan Polak [14]posted about some trouble
   with typing in Template Haskell. Several responses regarding quoting types
   were posted, including a reference to Simon Marlow's "update" [15]paper.

  14. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8235
  15. http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/tmp/notes2.ps

   Web applications. Gary began a large [16]discussion by asking about
   writing Web applications. Several options were mentioned, including Wash
   and HAppS. S. Alexander Jacobsen [17]mentioned that he will be launching a
   commercial chat service using Haskell and AJAX with HAppS as the
   underlying core.

  16. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8215
  17. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8242

   Calling Haskell from C++. Felix Breuer [18]wrote about some trouble
   calling into Haskell from C++ programs. Several suggestions were provided,
   mostly relating to C++ name mangling.

  18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/8652

   What gets profiled? Niels began a [19]discussion on the use of profiling
   features by commenting that profiling didn't seem to show the problem in
   his own code. Several suggestions regarding memory use and possible
   reasons that profilers might miss things were provided.

  19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/8622

Haskell Toolchain

   GHC 6.4.1. Simon Marlow posted an [20]update on GHC 6.4.1. Though more bug
   reports have been rolling in while he was away, only a few are blockers
   for 6.4.1. The tentative release date is September 19.

  20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/8649

   Data.Monoid. Ross Paterson [21]proposed replacing an instance of
   Data.Monoid. There was some discussion about whether the old or new
   instance was better.

  21. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3719

Quotes of the Week

   <poetix> "Oh, a monad...that's just a funny name for a particular
            sort of arrow"
   <mcnster> Chocolate Frosted Monads, new from Cadbury
   <mcnster> ... "All the sugar, twice the arrows"
   <mcnster> Mr. Tweedsmuir, we're going to have to bypass your left
             ventrical monad. You'll probably never play Chopin again
   <poetix> Readers of the ABC Warriors strip in 2000AD may remember The
            Monad as the concentrated essence of human evil
   <mcnster> Monadocet. Because category theory should be understood
             by everyone.

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  22. http://sequence.complete.org/hwn-contrib