[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: September 20, 2005

[John Goerzen]

                    Haskell Weekly News: September 20, 2005

   Greetings, and thanks for reading the eighth 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

     * GHC 6.4.1. According to Simon Marlow's [3]announcement, GHC 6.4.1 is
       out and is mainly a bugfix release. No library APIs have changed, so
       code working with GHC 6.4 should continue to work.

   3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12158

     * Visual Haskell 0.0. Simon Marlow [4]announced Visual Haskell 0.0, a
       Haskell development environment for the Microsoft Visual Studio
       platform.

   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12161

Discussion

   Autrijus Tang interviewed at perl.com. Autrijus Tang is a Perl hacker and
   developer of the first working Perl 6 [5]interpreter, which is written in
   Haskell. On Page 2 of an [6]interview on perl.com, he explained Haskell in
   glowing terms to the Perl audience. Favorite quote: "Haskell . . . is
   faster than C++, more concise than Perl, more regular than Python, more
   flexible than Ruby, more typeful than C#, more robust than Java, and has
   absolutely nothing in common with PHP." Thanks to metaperl for
   [7]mentioning this on the Haskell Sequence. There was als a small
   [8]thread about this.

   5. http://www.pugscode.com/
   6. http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/09/08/autrijus-tang.html?page=2
   7. http://sequence.complete.org/node/98
   8. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8288

   Overloading (==). In an interesting [9]thread, Tom Hawkins asked if it was
   possible to overload (==) to return something other than a Bool. The
   answer was no, but the discussion led to comments about using typeclasses
   instead of a simple Bool type in certain situations.

   9. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8346

   Haskell vs. Lisp. This [10]discussion began with a post from Mark Carter,
   who is considering Haskell and wondering what advantages it might have
   over Lisp. Many perspectives were discussed, especially relating to
   metaprogramming (Lisp macros and Template Haskell). David F. Place had an
   interesting [11]post. As someone with experience with both Haskell and
   Lisp, he commented that Haskell's "lazy evaluation eliminates 99% of the
   need for macros in Lisp." There were also posts by [12]Tomasz Zielonka,
   [13]Cale Gibbard were also insightful.

  10. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8309
  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8342
  12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8356
  13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8316

   Network Parsing and Parsec. John Goerzen posed a [14]question about using
   Parsec to parse network streams such as IMAP, where the results of the
   parsing itself determine how much data should be read, and reading too
   much data results in deadlock. Some solutions offered included a separate
   tokenizer phase and the use of the Parsec state to help.

  14. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/8293

Haskell Toolchain

   The Big News this week is, of course, the new release of GHC. A big thanks
   to everyone on the GHC team for this.

   Cabal du jour. Cabal keeps coming up on the libraries list. This week's
   [15]discussion revolves around whether or not a --package-db option is
   wise.

  15. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3729

Quotes of the Week

   "Learning Haskell requires some brain rewiring, so the best way to learn
   it is by coding something in it for real. Yuval, a fellow "lambdacamel,"
   learned Haskell from scratch by coding up a Forth parser, interpreter, and
   runtime all within a few days." -- Autrijus Tang

Corrections

   Two typos in last week's HWN. In the web applications story, "S. Alexander
   Jacobsen" should have been "S. Alexander Jacobson". In the binary pasrser
   combinators story, "Malcolm Wallac" should have been "Malcolm Wallace".
   Sorry about that.

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