[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: October 03, 2006

Donald Bruce Stewart dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
Tue Oct 3 04:14:24 EDT 2006


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haskell Weekly News
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
Issue 43 - October 03, 2006
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   Welcome to issue 43 of HWN, a weekly newsletter covering developments
   in the Haskell community.

   The proceedings of the first Haskell Workshop are now available
   online, and work has begun on a unified library for generics in
   Haskell.

Announcements

     * Proceedings Haskell Workshop 1995. Henrik Nilsson [1]announced
       that in celebration of the 10th [2]Haskell Workshop that took
       place recently, the proceedings of the very first Haskell
       workshop, in La Jolla 1995, have now been made available on [3]the
       Haskell Workshop home page. Thanks to Paul Hudak for help locating
       the proceedings and arranging for them to be scanned into PDF.

   1. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14312/
   2. http://haskell.org/haskell-workshop
   3. http://haskell.org/haskell-workshop/1995

     * Common library for generic programming. Johan Jeuring and Andres
       Loeh [4]announced an initiative to design a common library for
       generic programming, which should work together with most of the
       Haskell compilers, and for which they hope to guarantee support
       for generics in Haskell into the future. If you want to get
       involved (or just want to see the discussion), you can subscribe
       to [5]the generics mailing list. Check the [6]Haskell research
       wiki for some background on generics.

   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14304/
   5. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/generics
   6. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Research_papers/Generics

     * GHC 6.6 Second Release Candidate. Ian Lynagh [7]announced that the
       Second Release Candidate phase for GHC 6.6 is underway. Get
       testing!

   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/10823

     * Lazy functional language for the JVM. Luke Evans [8]announced that
       the research group at Business Objects has developed a lazily
       evaluated, strongly-typed language called CAL, with many
       similarities to Haskell, targeting the JVM, to facilitate
       representing certain kinds of business logic as reusable,
       composable pieces.

   8. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14296/

Haskell'

   This section covers the [9]Haskell' standardisation process.

     * [10]Pattern guards
     * [11]Improving pattern guard syntax

   9. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
  10. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1680/focus=1680
  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1704

Discussion

     * Typeclass versus Prolog programming. Oleg Kiselyov [12]wrote
       further on the connection between typeclass hacking and logic
       programming.

  12. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/15401/

     * Irrefutable patterns for existential types. Several Haskellers
       [13]discussed, in a long thread, issues relating to irrefutable
       patterns when combined with existentials or GADTs. [14]Read more.

  13. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/15564/
  14. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/15633/

     * GHC on the Mac. Simon Peyton-Jones [15]sought contributors to help
       maintain [16]GHC on the Mac.

  15. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/10801/
  16. http://haskell.org/ghc

     * Smallest Double. Tamas Papp [17]initiated a thread regarding
       finding the smallest Double such that 1+x /= x, for a numerics
       problem.

  17. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/15573/focus=15573

     * Migrating content to the new wiki. Ian Lynagh [18]forced an action
       to finally close down the old hawiki, and move all content to the
       new haskell wiki. Work to be done is [19]here.

  18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14314
  19. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/HaWiki_migration

Blog noise

   Haskell news from the blogosphere.

     * [20]Functional programming for the rest of us
     * [21]Coming soon: Perl 6
     * [22]Arrows, like monads, are monoids
     * [23]OOP is dead

  20. http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html
  21. http://www.samag.com/documents/s=10093/sam0609j/0609j.htm
  22. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1750
  23. http://kawagner.blogspot.com/2006/08/oop-is-dead-part-2.html

Quotes of the Week

     * Bill Wood: It became obvious that when a Prolog program is tuned
       by removing non-determinism it moves towards a functional program.

     * Bjarne Stroustrup: Any verbose and tedious solution is error-prone
       because programmers get bored. [S 9.4 of C++, 2nd edition]

     * Hamilton Richards: It's fair to say that functional programming
       requires a very different mind-set, but once you've mad e the
       `jump`, programming in conventional languages feels like doing
       arithmetic in Roman numerals.

     * Larry Wall: Take Lisp, you know it's the most beautiful language
       in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along.

     * dons: Welcome to computer science, we count from 0.

     * glguy: This is like Web 5GL. I like it!

     * sjanssen: Quoth the Prelude, Chapter 6, verse 4: Yeah verily shall
       repeat floweth cons cells over.

Code Watch

     * Fri Sep 29 09:07:17 PDT 2006 simonpj. Remove Linear Implicit
       Parameters, and all their works. Linear implicit parameters have
       been in GHC quite a while, but we decided they were a mis-feature
       and scheduled them for removal. This patch does the job.

About the Haskell Weekly News

   Each week, new editions are posted to [24]the Haskell mailing list as
   well as to [25]the Haskell Sequence and [26]Planet Haskell. [27]RSS is
   also available, and headlines appear on [28]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   [29]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

  24. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  25. http://sequence.complete.org/
  26. http://planet.haskell.org/
  27. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  28. http://haskell.org/
  29. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN


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