[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: March 27, 2006

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

                      Haskell Weekly News: March 27, 2006

   Greetings, and thanks for reading issue 30 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.

   A busy, exciting week!

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

Announcements

     * monadLib 2.0. Iavor Diatchki [4]announced the release of monadLib
       2.0 -- library of monad transformers for Haskell. 'monadLib' is a
       descendent of 'mtl', the monad template library that is
       distributed with most Haskell implementations. Check out the
       [5]library web page.

   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13460
   5. http://www.csee.ogi.edu/~diatchki/monadLib

     * Text.Regex.Lazy (0.33). Chris Kuklewicz [6]announced the release
       of [7]Text.Regex.Lazy. This is an alternative to Text.Regex along
       with some enhancements. GHC's Text.Regex marshals the data back
       and forth to C arrays, to call libc. This is far too slow (and
       strict). This module understands regular expression Strings via a
       Parsec parser and creates an internal data structure
       (Text.Regex.Lazy.Pattern). This is then transformed into a Parsec
       parser to process the input String, or into a DFA table for
       matching against the input String or FastPackedString. The input
       string is consumed lazily, so it may be an arbitrarily long or
       infinite source.

   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4464
   7. http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazy-regex

     * HDBC 0.99.2. John Goerzen [8]released HDBC 0.99.2, along with
       0.99.2 versions of all database backends. John says "If things go
       well, after a few weeks of testing, this version will become HDBC
       1.0.0". [9]HDBC is a multi-database interface system for Haskell.

   8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13504
   9. http://quux.org/devel/hdbc

     * Planet Haskell. Isaac Jones [10]asked if someone could volunteer
       to set up "Planet Haskell", an RSS feed aggregator in the style of
       Planet Debian, Planet Gnome or Planet Perl. Happily, Antti-Juhani
       Kaijanaho stepped up, and now Planet Haskell is live at
       [11]http://planet.haskell.org. Antti-Juhani asks that any Haskell
       people with blogs submit their feed urls to him, so check it out!

  10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/12033
  11. http://planet.haskell.org/

     * Haskell on Gentoo Linux Duncan Coutts [12]writes that GHC 6.4.1
       has been marked stable on x86, amd64, sparc and ppc, for
       [13]Gentoo Linux. (We also support ppc64, alpha and hppa.) Gentoo
       also has a collection of over 30 Haskell libraries and tools.
       There is also a #gentoo-haskell [14]irc channel on freenode.

  12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/9557
  13. http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=ghc
  14. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel

     * Concurrent Yhc. The Yhc dev team [15]reports that Yhc now includes
       support for concurrency! The interface is the same as Concurrent
       GHC. Currently only
          + Control.Concurrent
          + Control.Concurrent.MVar
          + Control.Concurrent.QSem
       are implemented, however many other abstractions can be written in
       Haskell in terms of MVars.

  15. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/yhc/2006-March/000085.html

     * GHC 6.4.2 Release Candidates Simon Marlow [16]announced that GHC
       was moving into release-candidate mode for version 6.4.2. [17]Grab
       a snapshot and try it out. The available builds are:
       x86_64-unknown-linux (Fedora Core 5), i386-unknown-linux (glibc
       2.3 era), and Windows (i386-unknown-mingw32). Barring any serious
       hiccups, the release should be out in a couple of weeks.

  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/9588
  17. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/stable/dist/

     * HaRe 0.3. Sneaking out without us noticing, in January, a [18]new
       snapshot of HaRe, the Haskell refactoring tool, was released. This
       snapshot of HaRe 0.3 is now compatible with the latest GHC and
       Programmatica. New refactorings have also been added.

  18. http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/refactor-fp/hare.html

Haskell'

   This section covers activity on [19]Haskell' standardisation process.
     * [20]Bringing discusison to a close
     * [21]Time to focus discussion
     * [22]Collections interface
     * [23]MonadPlus reform
     * [24]Strict tuples
     * [25]seq as a class method
     * [26]Alternatives to . for composition
     * [27]Concurrency
     * [28]Pre-emptive or co-operative concurrency
     * [29]Liberal type synonyms

  19. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
  20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1084
  21. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/992
  22. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1003
  23. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1005
  24. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/995
  25. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1033
  26. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1041
  27. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1057
  28. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1057
  29. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1075

Discussion

     * Disruptive Haskell. Paul Johnson [30]forked a long discussion on
       how Haskell can be seen as a disruptive technology, and what
       Haskell's "brand" might be. Many interesting contributions were
       made.

  30. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13475

     * Bit streaming Haskell. Per Gustafsson, having made a proposal to
       extend the Erlang `binary' data type from being a sequence of
       bytes (a byte stream) to being a sequence of bits (a bitstream),
       with the ability to do pattern matching at the bit level,
       [31]asked for help writing efficient (and beautiful) Haskell
       versions of his [32]bitstream benchmarks. Several improved
       programs were submitted, bringing the Haskell code into line with
       the OCaml and Erlang entries.

  31. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/12040
  32. http://bitbenches.infogami.com/

Quotes of the Week

   Pseudonym's condensed LtU guide to the static types vs dynamic types
   debate:
     * Haskell-vs-Scheme is an issue on which reasonable people differ.
     * Ruby-vs-Java is an issue on which unreasonable people differ.

   Everything else is details. :-) 

   Seen on #haskell:
        shapr :: Science News had an article about a tribe of isolated villagers
        in Brazil that don't have recursion or indirection in their language.

Contributing to HWN

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  33. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN