[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: October 10, 2006

Donald Bruce Stewart dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
Mon Oct 9 22:53:52 EDT 2006


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haskell Weekly News
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
Issue 44 - October 10, 2006
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

   Welcome to issue 44 of HWN, a weekly newsletter covering developments
   in the Haskell community.

   Developments this week include Lennart Kolmodin's new inotify bindings
   for Haskell, work begins on Spanish translations of Haskell
   literature, and new versions of Darcs and Cabal are tagged

Announcements

     * hinotify 0.1. Lennart Kolmodin [1]announced hinotify 0.1, a
       library to [2]inotify which has been part of the Linux kernel
       since 2.6.13. inotify provides file system event notification,
       simply add a watcher to a file or directory and get an event when
       it is accessed or modified. [3]API and [4]source.

   1. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14345/
   2. http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml/inotify/
   3. http://haskell.org/~kolmodin/code/hinotify/docs/api/
   4. http://haskell.org/~kolmodin/code/hinotify/

     * Monad Transformer Tutorial. Martin Grabmueller [5]published a
       small tutorial on using monad transformers. In contrast to others
       approaches, it concentrates on using them, not on their
       implementation. [6]PDF and Literate Haskell source available.

   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/15714
   6. http://uebb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~magr/pub/Transformers.en.html

     * Speaking Haskell in Spanish. Luis Araujo [7]announced [8]a project
       to make Haskell documentation more available to Spanish speakers.
       The idea is to [9]collect information in Spanish about Haskell,
       including news and tutorials, and to translate [10]Haskell wiki
       pages.

   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/15713/
   8. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell.es
   9. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell.es
  10. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Special:Popularpages

     * Haskell Packages 6.6. Isaac Jones [11]announced that the Cabal
       package tools for Haskell are in a good state, with almost 30
       packages already in [12]the database. Time to start testing
       packages, starting with the cabal release candidate that'll go
       into GHC 6.6, to make sure they work nicely together!

  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cabal.devel/175
  12. http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/

     * Cabal-1.1.6 release candidate. Duncan Coutts [13]released a
       tarball for the next 1.16 Cabal release candidate. Let's get this
       tested before GHC 6.6 arrives!

  13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/5213/

     * Darcs 1.0.9 release candidate. Tommy Pettersson [14]announced the
       first release candidate for next stable [15]darcs, 1.0.9rc1. This
       will mainly be a bug fix version to get things right that got
       wrong or didn't get right in 1.0.7 and 1.0.8, but there are some
       new features and optimizations too.

  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/10332
  15. http://darcs.net/

     * Haskell and Vim. Marc Weber [16]wrote some Vim scripts to ease
       various Haskell coding tasks in Vim.

  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/15707

Haskell'

   This section covers the [17]Haskell' standardisation process.
     * [18]Status report
     * [19]Stand-alone deriving declarations (part 1)
     * [20]Stand-alone deriving declarations (part 2)

  17. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
  18. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/Status'
  19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1717/focus=1717
  20. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1726/focus=1726

Discussion

     * Allowing both prefix unary minus and right section subtraction.
       Michael Shulman [21]described a technique for writing operators
       that can be used both as infix or postfix operators, using the new
       postfix support in GHC 6.6.

  21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/15710/

     * Google Summer of Code Summit and Haskell. Don Stewart [22]sought
       feedback on this year's Google Summer of Code Haskell projects, in
       preparation for Haskell.org's attendance at the Google SoC Summit.

  22. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14339/

     * GHC under Wine. Robert Marlow [23]described his experience setting
       up GHC under Wine to produce Windows binaries from Linux.

  23. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/10857

     * Function lists and arguments. Joel Koerwer [24]described a puzzle
       to try to apply a function of type a function of type (a -> a ->
       ... -> a -> a), to a list of arguments of the same length.
       [25]Some solutions were suggested.

  24. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/15681/focus=15681
  25. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/15683/focus=15683

Conference roundup

     * APLAS'06. Manuel Chakravarty [26]announced the call for
       participation [27]4th Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and
       Systems, to be held in Sydney.

  26. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14346
  27. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~aplas06/

Jobs

     * Open assistant professorship at Utrecht. Doaitse Swierstra
       [28]announced a 5 year position for an assistant professor at
       Utrecht. Current areas of interest include: domain specific
       embedded languages, programming language design and
       implementation, generic programming, program verification,
       advanced type systems. [29]More info.

  28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14343/
  29. http://www.cs.uu.nl/vacatures/en/62612.html

     * PhD studentship. Shengchao Qin [30]announced that applications are
       invited for a PhD student to work on resource analysis and
       verification for dependable embedded software, at the University
       of Durham. The successful applicant should have a good background
       in program analysis, type systems and type theory, software
       verification and embedded systems.

  30. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14347/

     * Post-doctoral position. Stephan Merz [31]announced that
       applications are invited for a post-doctoral fellowship on the
       modeling and verification of domain-specific languages in the
       [32]MOSEL team at LORIA. The project aims to model domain-specific
       languages in the specification language [33]TLA+ and to develop
       verification techniques for programs written in DSLs against
       high-level correctness properties. Candidates must hold a PhD and
       should have demonstrated research interest in formal methods and
       formal reasoning. They should preferably have experience with
       interactive proof assistants.

  31. http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/pipermail/types-announce/2006/000298.html
  32. http://www.loria.fr/equipes/mosel/
  33. http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/tla/tla.html

Blog noise

   Haskell news from the blogosphere.

     * [34]Roll your own Haskell IRC bot
     * [35]Understanding Monads Via Python List Comprehensions
     * [36]Mercury and imperative programming
     * [37]Languages as first-class design decisions
     * [38]Becoming a Haskell developer via YHC
     * [39]JAOO Conference: Functional Programming And Monads
     * [40]CompSci.ca does Functional Programming

  34. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Roll_your_own_IRC_bot
  35. http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog.php?id=1107301643
  36. http://www.mercury.cs.mu.oz.au/mailing-lists/mercury-users/mercury-users.9904/0038.html
  37. http://www.recursivethought.com/blog/view/languages-as-design
  38. http://jaortega.wordpress.com/2006/10/08/becoming-a-haskell-developer/
  39. http://best-practice-software-engineering.blogspot.com/2006/10/event-jaoo-conference-day-3.html
  40. http://compsci.ca/blog/compsci-does-functional-programming/

Quotes of the Week

     * Larry Wall: Perl is turning into Haskell. Someone shoot me.

     * Tim Berners-Lee [and the w3c]: Functional languages such as
       Haskell ... facilitate the creation of programs that may be easier
       to analyze than their imperative equivalents.

     * lispy: > init . map snd . filter fst . zip (fix ([True, False]
       ++)) . ap (zipWith (+)) tail . map length . group . fix $ show

     * lambdabot:
       [2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048,4096,8192,16384,32768,65536,
       131072,...

     * Verity Stob: Lisp is still #1 for key algorithmic techniques such
       as recursion and condescension.

     * dcoutts: (:[]) looks like a monster

     * largos: [on programming languages] ...and I'd rather not own as
       much rope as c/c++ gives you.

     * ozone: When will bytestring be O(1) for all operations?

     * skew: [Monads are] just like the sequences of statements in other
       languages. Except very rarely have they thought so deeply about
       what that sequencing means

Code Watch

     * Stand-alone deriving declarations added. bringert. Add [41]support
       for stand-alone 'deriving' declarations. The main motivation for
       this is to allow you to use the instance deriving mechanism for
       data types and newtypes declared in other modules, for example if
       you want to use generics with existing code that does not derive
       Typeable and Data, or want to use Show for debugging. The syntax
       is: deriving Class for Type, and for multi-parameter type
       classes:: deriving (Class t1 ... tn) for Type

  41. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cvs.ghc/17038/

About the Haskell Weekly News

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