[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: January 23, 2006

Donald Bruce Stewart dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
Sun Jan 22 23:33:46 EST 2006


                     Haskell Weekly News: January 23, 2006

   Greetings, and thanks for reading the 21st issue of HWN, a weekly
   newsletter for 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

New Releases

     * Haskell'

       This week Isaac Jones announced that the Haskell' standardisation
       process is underway. Haskell' will be a conservative refinement of
       Haskell 98:

        "Announcing the Haskell' ("Haskell-Prime") process. A short time
         ago, I asked for volunteers to help with the next Haskell standard.
         A brave group has spoken up, and we've organized ourselves into a
         committee in order to coordinate the community's work. It will be
         the committee's task to bring together the very best ideas and work
         of the broader community in an "open-source" way, and to fill in
         any gaps in order to make Haskell' as coherent and elegant as
         Haskell 98."

       Read the full announcement [4]here.

       Presently, the following resources are available:
          + [5]The haskell-prime mailing list
          + The Haskell' [6]issue tracking system/wiki
          + A [7]darcs repository for larger code examples and experiments

       Please join us in making Haskell' a success.

   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13138
   5. http://haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime
   6. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
   7. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/SourceCode

Resources and Tools

     * Cabal. Isaac Jones [8]announced some changes to Cabal, including
       new changes to the `hooks' interface. Feedback is encouraged.
       Secondly, a move is underway to build [9]an exhaustive list of all
       Cabalised packages. Add a link if you have something! Isaac is
       asking people to re-send any Cabal bug reports or feature requests
       yet to be addressed. Report them on the [10]Cabal Wiki & Bug
       Tracker

   8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4145
   9. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/CabalPackages
  10. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/

     * Darcs switchover GHC has [11]switched to darcs. The era of CVS is
       at an end:

        From: Simon Marlow
        Subject: TAG final switch to darcs, this repo is now live

        Fri Jan 20 05:46:30 PST 2006  Simon Marlow  microsoft.com>
          tagged final switch to darcs, this repo is now live

  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cvs.ghc/13186

Discussion

     * IO Regions. Oleg Kiselyov [12]describes a simple implementation of
       monadic regions. The technique provides static guarantees that
       neither a file handle nor any computation involving the handle can
       leak outside of the region that created it. The technique has no
       runtime overhead and induces no runtime errors. For some
       background, John Launchbury and Simon Peyton Jones's 94 paper
       [13]Lazy Functional State Threads is useful.

  12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13106
  13. http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~jl/Papers/stateThreads.ps

     * Lexically scoped type variables. Simon Peyton-Jones [14]released a
       proposal to change the way in which lexically-scoped typed
       variables work in GHC, as part of a revision to make type
       inference for GADTs simpler and more uniform.

  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/9219

     * Providing an alternative to GMP. Esa Ilari Vuokko [15]began a
       discussion on modifying the GHC runtime and build system to
       support alternative arbtirary precision arithmetic libraries,
       other than the GPL'd GMP.

  15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cvs.ghc/13198

     * Arrays interfaces. (clarification) The Haskell'98 library report
       contains only basic Array implementation. The Hierarchical
       Libraries, shipped with modern versions of GHC, Hugs and NHC,
       includes much richer arrays library. [16]Bulat Ziganshin started
       [17]a wiki page describing how to use these new array interfaces.

  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12992
  17. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Arrays

Papers

   This is a new HWN section collecting paper or article abstracts on
   Haskell-related topics. If you have submitted a new Haskell paper,
   send your abstract to HWN, and the abstract will appear in the next
   issue.
     * Ralf Lämmel. Book review, "The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and
       Programming" by Kees Doets and Jan van Eijck. To appear in JoLLI
       journal; 13 pages. [18]http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ralf/JoLLI06.
       The "Haskell road" is an excellent book worth considering as
       course material and reading anyhow. A non-Haskell road is also
       discussed in the review.

  18. http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ralf/JoLLI06

     * Ralf Lämmel. "Google's MapReduce Programming Model -- Revisited"
       Draft; To be submitted; feedback appreciated; 27 pages.
       [19]http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ralf/MapReduce.
       The seminal MapReduce paper had been briefly discussed at LTU
       without really going into technical details. The present paper
       discovers the concepts from a functional programming perspective.
       Did you ever wonder why MapReduce is called MapReduce?

  19. http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ralf/MapReduce

Darcs Corner

     * Darcs Blogging. Zooko [20]wrote an interesting blog entry on the
       PR issues darcs has, and on the various activities undertaken by
       the darcs developers.

  20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/9258

Quote of the Week

    <monochrom> monadic regions? sounds neat.
    <monochrom> "monadic ___" sounds neat :)
    <dons> forall a. Monad a => Neat a

Contributing to HWN

   Thanks to Bulat Ziganshin and Isaac Jones for contributing material to
   this edition of HWN.

   You can help us create new editions of this newsletter. Please see the
   [21]contributing information, send stories to dons -at-
   cse.unsw.edu.au. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/hwn

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


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