[Haskell] Announce: Lambdabot 4.0

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

I'm pleased to announce the release of lambdabot 4.0!

lambdabot is a stable, feature rich IRC bot based on a plugin framework.
lambdabot 4.0 comes with a suite of more than 50 plugins, including:

    * a Haskell 98 interpreter
    * two lambda calculus interpreters
    * an unlambda interpreter
    * a pointfree code refactorer
    * Hoogle support
    * support for the djinn haskell code generator/theorem prover
    * a Haskell type and kind inference
    * typeclass instance lookup
    * Haskell library search tool
    * online help
    * channel logging
    * a generic search interface, support google, wikipedia and the haskell wiki
    * a babel language translator
    * darcs patch tracking
    * offline mode, editor support
    * and much more

Over the last 14 months work on lambdabot has continued, with help from
the #haskell irc community. Over this period, more than 550 patches
have been contributed, from 22 developers. The lambdabot code base is
now over the 10k lines of code mark!

Some of the new features in this release include:

    * Offline mode! Lambdabot can be used as a command line tool, or
      from within and editor, to process Haskell source.
    * Evaluate Bird-style literate haskell directly in channel
    * Hoogle plugin
    * Log plugin
    * Vote plugin, for conduncting online polls
    * Darcs patch watch plugin
    * Where plugin, a database of haskell project urls
    * Code plugin. quote random code from $fptools
    * Elite plugin, for producing 1337$p33k
    * Url plugin, print titles of urls posted in channel
    * Tell plugin, post and retrive messages for users 
    * Local time plugin, report a user's local time
    * Djinn plugin, for Lennart's Djinn tool
    * Pretty plugin, for pretty-printing haskell fragments
    * Compose plugin, a meta-plugin for dynamic composition of other plugins
    * LambdaShell plugin, another lambda calculus interpreter
    * Unlambda plugin, an interpreter for unlambda written in Haskell
    * Gwiki plugin searches the haskell wiki
    * Hylo plugin, for generating hylomorphisms using the UMinho DrHylo tool
    * Instances plugin, to find instances for typeclasses

As well as:
    * A new `contextual' plugin system, where plugins can perform
      arbitrary transformations on the channel stream.
    * Cabal build system
    * Flood protection
    * Start on XMPP support
    * Improved memory usage, using ByteString and Binary serialised state
    * More stable.
    * Much refactoring

lambdabot is available via darcs:
    darcs get --partial http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/lambdabot

More details are at:
    http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/lambdabot.html

-- Don Stewart