[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: February 13, 2006

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

                    Haskell Weekly News: February 13, 2006

   Greetings, and thanks for reading issue 24 of HWN, a weekly newsletter
   covering developments in the Haskell community. Each Monday, new
   editions are posted to [1]the Haskell mailing list and to [2]The
   Haskell Sequence. [3]RSS is also available.

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

Announcements

     * FFI Imports Packaging Utility. Dimitry Golubovsky [4]announced the
       pre-release of the FFI Imports Packaging Utility (ffipkg), a new
       member of the HSFFIG package.

       The `ffipkg' utility prepares a Haskell package containing FFI
       imports for building by accepting locations of C header and
       foreign library files as command line arguments and producing
       Haskell source files with FFI declarations, a Makefile, a Cabal
       package descriptor file, and a Setup.hs file suitable for running
       the Cabal package setup program. The utility acts as a "driver"
       running the C preprocessor, the equivalent of the hsffig program,
       and the source splitter.

       darcs get --partial http://hsffig.sourceforge.net/repos/hsffig-1.1

   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13262

     * Haskell in Higher Education. John Hughes [5]announced that the
       result of his survey into the use of Haskell in higher education
       are out. The survey covers 89 universities, accounting for
       5-10,000 students being taught Haskell this academic year. The
       results are [6]available on the web.

   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13234
   6. http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Wash/Survey/teaching.htm

Haskell'

   This section covers activity on [7]Haskell' this week.
     * [8]The type and class namespace
     * [9]The monomorphism restriction and performance
     * [10]Haskell' priorities
     * [11]Specifying language extensions
     * [12]FilePath as a data type
     * [13]Objective data on the use of extensions
     * [14]Parallel list comprehensions
     * [15]Tuple representations
     * Restricted data types [16]parts 1, [17]2, and [18]3.
     * Bang patterns [19]parts 1, and [20]2
     * [21]First-class labels
     * [22]Scoped type variables

   7. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
   8. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/181
   9. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/257
  10. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/259
  11. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/312
  12. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/338
  13. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/361
  14. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/373
  15. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/395
  16. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/405
  17. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/445
  18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/471
  19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/411
  20. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/439
  21. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/447
  22. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/461

Discussion

     * Generic catch in a MonadIO. Oleg Kiselyov [23]forked an
       interesting discussion, with code, on formulating a generic catch
       function.

  23. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13247

     * RFC: Streams. Bulat Ziganshin [24]posted a request for feedback on
       the interface of a new Streams library CharEncoding transformers.

  24. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13249

     * RFC: Time Library 0.3. Ashley Yakely [25]announced the third draft
       of a replacement for the standard time library.

  25. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4249

     * Eliminating Multiple-Array Bound Checking through Non-dependent .
       Oleg [26]also writes on writing code with non-trivial static
       guarantees in the present-day Haskell (i.e., Haskell98 + rank-2
       types). He describes how to eliminate array bounds checking when
       processing several arrays at a time. The number of arrays to
       process is not statically known. Furthermore, the arrays may have
       different sizes and bounds -- potentially, empty and
       non-overlapping too. Excellent stuff.

  26. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13259

     * Haskell #1 in Great Language Shootout. As of Friday Haskell is
       ranked [27]overall 1st on the [28]Great Language Shootout, and 2nd
       fastest. Thanks to the following people (in alphabetical order)
       who've contributed code and ideas (and apologies if I've missed
       any one!): Aaron, Alson, Bertram, Bjorn, Branimir, Brian, Bryn,
       Cale, Chris, David, Don, Einar, Greg, Iavor, Jan-Willem,
       Jean-Philippe, Jeff, Joel, Johannes, Josh, Ketil, Kimberly,
       Lemmih, Matthias, Mirko, Sebastian, Simon and Udo.

  27. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all
  28. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/

Code Watch

   Command line completion. Mon Feb  6 04:26:54 PST 2006  Simon Marlow

    * Basic completion in GHCi

    This patch adds completion support to GHCi when readline is being
    used.  Completion of identifiers (in scope only, but including
    qualified identifiers) in expressions is provided.  Also, completion
    of commands (:cmd), and special completion for certain commands
    (eg. module names for the :module command) are also provided.

Contributing to HWN

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