[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: November 28, 2006
Donald Bruce Stewart
dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
Mon Nov 27 20:09:30 EST 2006
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Haskell Weekly News
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
Issue 51 - November 28, 2006
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Welcome to issue 51 of HWN, a weekly newsletter covering developments
in the Haskell community.
Automated testing fever strikes the camp, with three new
QuickCheck-related libraries and tools released.
Announcements
* QuickCheck 2 development version. Bjorn Bringert [1]announced that
the development version of QuickCheck 2 is now available in a
public darcs repository. Highlights of the new QuickCheck version
include: shrinking of failing test cases; supports testing monadic
code; handles exceptions gracefully; coarbitrary has moved to a
separate class; type-level modifiers for changing test data
generation (e.g. NonNegative); function table printing; and
user-defined actions when properties fail. The source is
[2]available via darcs.
1. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14511
2. http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~bringert/darcs/QuickCheck/
* PQC: QuickCheck in the Age of Concurrency. Don Stewart
[3]announced PQC: Parallel QuickCheck. [4]PQC provides a single
module: [5]Test.QuickCheck.Parallel. This is a QuickCheck driver
that runs property lists as jobs in parallel, and will utilise as
many cores as you wish, with the SMP parallel GHC 6.6 runtime. It
is simple, scalable replacement for Test.QuickCheck.Batch.
3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14503
4. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/pqc.html
5. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/pqc/Test-QuickCheck-Parallel.html
* cabal-test: automatic testing for Cabal projects. David
Himmelstrup [6]announced cabal-test, the automatic tester for
Cabal projects. The cabal-test tool is capable of testing embedded
QuickCheck properties in any and all cabalized projects. The tests
are currently executed in parallel with PQC. QuickCheck properties
can reside anywhere in the code and don't have to be exported. The
[7]darcs repo is available.
6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14519
7. http://darcs.haskell.org/~lemmih/cabal-test
* Streams 0.1.7. Bulat Ziganshin [8]announced Streams version 0.1.7,
a fast extensible [9]I/O and serialization library. Changes
include: GHC 6.6 support, support for files larger than 4G on
Windows, haddock documentation.
8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14504
9. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Library/Streams
* Ranged Sets 0.0.3. Paul Johnson [10]announced the 0.0.3 release of
[11]Ranged Sets. Ranged sets allow programming with sets of values
described by a list of ranges. A value is a member of the set if
it lies within one of the ranges. The ranges in a set are ordered
and non-overlapping, so the standard set operations can be
implemented by merge algorithms in O(n) time.
10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14492/
11. http://ranged-sets.sourceforge.net/Ranged/
* Type-class overloaded functions. Oleg Kiselyov [14]presented
functions polymorphic over classes of types. Each instance of such
(2-polymorphic) function uses ordinary 1-polymorphic methods, to
generically process values of many types, members of that
2-instance type class. The typeclass constraints are thus
manipulated as first-class entities. We also show how to write
typeclass instances with back-tracking: if one instance does not
apply, the typechecker will chose the `next' instance -- in the
precise meaning of `next'.
14. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14482/focus=14483
* Cabal mode for emacs. Matthew Danish [15]released a small (and
developing) major mode for editing Cabal files in emacs.
15. http://mapcar.org/haskell/cabal-mode/
* YCR2JS Programmers Guide Draft. Dimitry Golubovsky [16]announced
the draft of low-level [17]programming guide for Yhc Core to
Javascript converter. Everyone interested in future use of this
tool is encouraged to read and review the Guide. Its purpose is to
give some ideas about interaction of Haskell programs converted
into Javascript with a web browser on the lowest possible level,
without application frameworks and support libraries (just because
these haven't been developed).
16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/16764
17. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yhc/Javascript/Programmers_guide
* NeHe Tutorials in Haskell. Jason Dagit [18]announced the
availability of the (somewhat) famous NeHe tutorials for OpenGL
have been ported to HOpenGL. A [19]darcs repository is provided.
18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/16870/focus=16870
19. http://codersbase.com/index.php/Nehe-tuts
Haskell'
This section covers the [20]Haskell' standardisation process.
* [21]Standard (core) libraries initiative: rationale
20. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
21. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1919/focus=1919
Discussion
* The Future of MissingH. John Goerzen [22]opened a discussion on
the future development of MissingH, in order to improve usability
and adoption by the community. It was felt that the current
monolithic structure, and nondescript naming raises the barrier to
use.
22. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/16819/focus=16819
* Controlling backtracking with the list monad. Isto [23]posed an
interesting question about whether the backtracking in a list
monad could be controlled, producing a nice way to build branch
and bounding algorithms
23. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/16776/focus=16776
* Lifting conditionals. Dougal Stanton [24]asked about lifting
if/then/else into the IO monad, revealing some interesting
subtleties in the implementation
24. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/16779/focus=16779
* Cheap commits for improving the library documentation. Don Stewart
[25]created a new page, for non-core contributors to submit
suggestions on improving library documentation. Rather than
require the user to produce a darcs patch, than can instead add
their change to the wiki page. Ideally, a wiki-editable version of
the entire haddock docs would be desired
25. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/16848/focus=16848
* Optimising a hash function. Ivan Tomac [26]asked about optimising
low-level bit shifting code to run close to C speed.
26. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/16849/focus=16849
* Common subexpression elimination. Christian Maeder [27]asked about
common subexpression elimination in GHC.
27. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/11318/focus=11318
* Passing arrays between Haskell and C without overhead. Brian Hulley.
[28]asked for advice on how best to bind to a C library,
from Haskell, such that data can be passed with zero copying.
28. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/11313/focus=11313
* Creating Loadable Dynamic libraries Libraries in OSX. Alfonso Acosta.
[29]described how to create dynamic loadable libraries (.so)
with GHC 6.6 under Linux X86 using some C glue code and linking
with -optl -shared. Advice was sought on porting this to OSX.
29. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/11297/focus=11297
Conference roundup
[30]Fun in the Afternoon
30. http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fun/nov-06/
* Links: web programming without tiers. Phil Wadler.
* Mechanized Metatheory Model-Checking. James Cheney. Syntactic
techniques based on operational semantics and type systems are
extremely useful for studying the metatheory of logics and
programming languages. However, proving properties of such systems
is often an onerous task, because there are often a large number
of 'standard' or straightforward cases. It is tempting to cut
corners and do careful proofs only for cases that seem
interesting, but this can easily lead to a counterexample being
missed. It therefore seems attractive to try to formalize such
proofs in order to ensure their validity. However, this cure is
often worse than the disease, since theorem proving tools tend to
have a high learning curve. Moreover, theorem proving generally
addresses the uncommon case of formalizing an informal proof of a
well-understood system which has stood the test of time, rather
than the common case of finding a bug in a poorly-understood
system that may still be under development.
* A Principled Approach to Version Control. Wouter Swierstra.
Version control systems are essential for managing the distributed
development of large software pro jects. We present a formal model
for reasoning about version control. In particular, we give a
general definition of patch. Patches abstract over the data on
which they operate, making our framework equally suited for
version control of everything from highly-structured XML files to
blobs of bits. We model repositories as a multiset of patches. The
mathematical definitions of patches and repositories enable us to
reason about complicated issues such as conflicts and conflict
resolution.
* C# is a functional programming language. Andrew Kennedy.
Polymorphic functions, parameterized types, lambda expressions,
type inference, streams, GADTs, and combinator libraries: these
are features usually associated with functional languages such as
Haskell and ML. In this talk I will show how the design of C#
3.0, launching next year, was strongly influenced by ideas from
functional programming, and supports all these features. I will
use classic examples from the functional programming literature to
illustrate the talk.
Blog noise
[31]Haskell news from the blogosphere.
* [32]Scoping, and my Scheme Interpreter
* [33]XP Day Benelux: the report
* [34]From Löb's Theorem to Spreadsheet Evaluation
* [35]A search engine written in Haskell: part two
* [36]OCaml - First Impressions
* [37]House: an Operating System Written in Haskell
* [38]Reverse Engineering Machines with the Yoneda Lemma
* [39]Haskell and functional programming
* [40]Query for readers: Interested in Haskell?
* [41]Why Haskell?
* [42]What rocks
* [43]Why pointers and references are a bad thing
* [44]Reasons to learn C
* [45]Some Thoughts on Haskell
* [46]Simon Peyton Jones and Tim Harris explain STM [video]
31. http://planet.haskell.org/
32. http://computativestylings.blogspot.com/2006/11/scoping-and-my-scheme-interpreter.html
33. http://matteo.vaccari.name/blog/?p=59
34. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2006/11/from-l-theorem-to-spreadsheet.html
35. http://haskell-web.blogspot.com/2006/11/search-engine-written-in-haskell-part_24.html
36. http://triple.aeoth.net/2006/11/24/ocaml-first-impressions/
37. http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=16554
38. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2006/11/yoneda-lemma.html
39. http://chanson.livejournal.com/156835.html
40. http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/11/query_for_readers_interested_i.php
41. http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/11/why_haskell.php
42. http://n3dst4.livejournal.com/50393.html
43. http://kawagner.blogspot.com/2006/11/why-pointers-and-references-are-bad.html
44. http://www.nekomancer.net/blog/archives/reasons-to-learn-c
45. http://geeklikemetoo.blogspot.com/2006/11/some-haskell-basics.html
46. http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=231495
Quotes of the Week
* Cale: GADT pattern match in non-rigid context. There are
prescriptions available for that sort of thing.
* Bulat: Base lib includes everything, from 'const' to starship
control
* Cale: I should actually think before coding, but the type system
is so good.
* Syzygy-: Why do I get the feeling that the arrow code was written
during 'Speak like a pirate day'?
* SamB: [on the subject of fromJust] thinks that unJust would be a
more fun name for that
* apfelmus: Ah, yet another UndeadArray necromancer exhausting his
stack of bones. May the forces of light suggest to structure the
incantation of darkness?
* dons: Ah, it *is* like Haskell. I see: Jiffy Pop is the family fun
treat. No other brand of popcorn offers a self-contained popping
pan. It can even be used outdoors.
* thetallguy: Using and advocating Haskell is like being Calvin (and
Hobbes). To you, it's alive, real, a true delight. To those who
know better, it's a stuffed tiger.
Code Watch
* Mon Nov 27 05:06:02 PST 2006. Wolfgang Thaller. [47]Initial
support for x86_64-darwin. Basic -fvia-C code generation is there,
not much testing.
47. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cvs.ghc/18000
* Fri Nov 24 15:05:48 PST 2006. simonpj. [48]Fix constraint handling
for lazy patterns. Lazy patterns are quite tricky! Consider f ~(C
x) = 3. Can the Num constraint from the 3 be discharged by a Num
dictionary bound by the pattern? Definitely not! See Note 'Hopping
the LIE in lazy patterns' in TcPat. The type checker wasn't
ensuring this, and that was causing all manner of strange things
to happen. It actually manifested as a strictness bug reported by
Sven Panne.
48. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cvs.ghc/17969
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