[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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