[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: November 14, 2006

Donald Bruce Stewart dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
Mon Nov 13 22:14:40 EST 2006 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haskell Weekly News
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
Issue 49 - November 14, 2006
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   Welcome to issue 49 of HWN, a weekly newsletter covering developments
   in the Haskell community.

   This week we see the announcement of a Haskell to Javascript compiler
   project, and the overhaul of GHC's typeclass machinery is complete.

Announcements

     * Compiling Haskell to Javascript: YCR2JS. Dimitry Golubovsky
       [1]announced Ycr2js, a sub-project within the [2]York Haskell
       Compiler (Yhc) project. It is aimed to create a tool to convert an
       arbitrary Haskell program into Javascript which in turn may be
       executed in any Web browser. With great amount of help from the
       Yhc Team, the converter has been integrated into the Yhc project,
       and initial stage of coding and development has been completed.
       [3]More documentation.

   1. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14471
   2. http://darcs.haskell.org/yhc
   3. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yhc/Javascript

     * System.FilePath 0.10. Neil Mitchell [4]announced System.FilePath
       0.10, which hopefully is pretty close to final. [5]This library
       manipulates FilePath's correctly on both Posix and Windows.

   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14467
   5. http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~ndm/projects/libraries.php#filepath

     * Major typeclass overhaul. Simon Peyton-Jones [6]mentioned that for
       some time he has been promising an overhaul of GHC's type
       inference machinery to fix the interactions between type classes
       and GADTs. This overhaul has now been completed, and user-visible
       changes are summarised, including: GHC's type inference becomes
       complete, the restriction that every constraint in a type
       signature must mention at least one of the quantified type
       variables is lifted, dictionaries are packaged in data
       constructors and the proper interaction between GADTs and type
       classes is now respected.

   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/11192

     * Implementing the lambda calculus. Lennart Augustsson [7]wrote
       about implementing interpreters for the lambda-calculus in
       Haskell, to [8]experiment with different implementation methods.

   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/16490
   8. http://darcs.augustsson.net/Darcs/Lambda/

     * Great language shootout: reloaded. Don Stewart [9]mentioned that
       now [10]GHC 6.6 is available on the shootout machines, the time
       has come to improve the existing [11]language shootout entries.
       Improvements can be posted to the [12]wiki for review.

   9. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/16454/focus=16454
  10. http://haskell.org/ghc
  11. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
  12. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Great_language_shootout

Haskell'

   This section covers the [13]Haskell' standardisation process.
     * [14]Overloading string literals
     * [15]Annotation systems

  13. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
  14. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1882/focus=1882
  15. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1889/focus=1889

Libraries

   This week's proposals and extensions to the [16]standard libraries.
     * [17]Adding Kleisli composition to Control.Monad
     * [18]Add ranged sets
     * [19]Add unsafeCoerce

  16. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Library_submissions
  17. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/5640/focus=5640
  18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/5635/focus=5635
  19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/5611/focus=5611

Discussion

     * Choosing a Haskell GUI library. Bulat Ziganshin [20]asked for
       advice on which Haskell gui library to use. Several suggestions
       were made.

  20. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/16497/focus=16497

Conference roundup

   Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2006)

     * Type Processing by Constraint Reasoning. Peter Stuckey. [21]Paper.

     * Principal Type Inference for GHC-Style Multi-Parameter Type
       Classes. Martin Sulzmann, Tom Schrijvers and Peter J Stuckey.
       [22]Paper.

     * Automatic Testing of Higher Order Functions. Pieter Koopman and
       Rinus Plasmeijer. [23]Paper.

  21. http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~pjs/papers/aplas06i.pdf
  22. http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~sulzmann/publications/ghc-mptc-inf.ps
  23. http://www.st.cs.ru.nl/papers/2006/koop2006-TestingOfHigherOrderFunctionsAPLAS.pdf

Jobs

     * Research position in spatial cognition (Haskell-related). Till
       Mossakowski [24]announced the availability of a Doctoral Research
       Assistant / Postdoctoral Researcher position at the Universität
       Bremen, concerned with classification and formalization of
       qualitative spatial calculi, relations among these calculi,
       spatial ontologies, and route graphs. [25]More information.

  24. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14469
  25. http://www.sfbtr8.uni-bremen.de/i4.html

Blog noise

   [26]Haskell news from the blogosphere.
     * [27]Getting real with Haskell
     * [28]A Simple RPN Calculator in Haskell
     * [29]One more grunt trying to learn Haskell
     * [30]Testing Telecoms Software with Quviq QuickCheck
     * [31]Quviq QuickCheck: A new automated testing tool
     * [32]My first Haskell adventure game!

  26. http://planet.haskell.org/
  27. http://therning.org/magnus/archives/219
  28. http://jcreigh.blogspot.com/2006/11/simple-rpn-calculator-in-haskell.html
  29. http://monad.carnalreason.org/wordpress/?p=4
  30. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1827
  31. http://blog.lab49.com/?p=703
  32. http://jpmoresmau.blogspot.com/2006/11/my-first-haskell-adventure-game.html

Quotes of the Week

     * dylan: I remember being introduced to lambdas (in perl) from the
       programming perl, 2nd edition book. I used them heavily ever
       since... like some kind of cocaine addiction.

     * jdunck: What's your safeword?

     * sketerpot: With very strict typing, you need an *unsafe*word.

     * Binkley: Can you represent 'more moronic than Slashdot' with a
       32-bit integer?

     * Robert Dockins: A Turing-complete type-checker isn't enough! Our
       work is not complete until the parser is a universal machine as
       well!

     * dons: Disable the type checker in GHC for 6 months and we'd have 5
       Haskell debuggers by the end of it.

     * lennart: System Verilog is one of the worst 'designs' I've ever
       seen. So I bet it will be popular

     * lispy: The biggest reason most developers I know don't fix a bug
       is because they don't know it exists yet

     * monochrom: Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
       Syntax rules like a macro

     * robreim: [on the new #haskell lojban channel] Great, now we've got
       to start an IRC channel for lojban-speaking, Haskell-coding
       anarchists

     * syntaxfree: Yes, Wadlerman: Prince of Funktions

Code Watch

     * 2006-11-09 17:01:33 GMT. Claus Reinke. [33]Syntax patch for lambda-match.

  33. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cvs.ghc/17645

     * 2006-11-06 21:27:30 GMT. Lennart Kolmodin. [34]New ghc-pkg option
       'check'. A patch for ghc-pkg show broken packages (due to missing
       dependencies) with a new command 'check', and also indicate broken
       packages when using the command 'list'.

  34. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cvs.ghc/17656

     * 2006-11-10 13:43:26 GMT. Simon Peyton Jones. [35]Use implication
       constraints to improve type inference.

  35. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cvs.ghc/17665

     * 2006-11-13 09:36:19 GMT. Simon Peyton Jones. [36]Add literal-shift
       rewrite rules.

  36. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cvs.ghc/17705

About the Haskell Weekly News

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