[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: September 18, 2006
Donald Bruce Stewart
dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
Mon Sep 18 05:06:32 EDT 2006
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Haskell Weekly News
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
Issue 41 - September 18, 2006
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Welcome to issue 41 of HWN, a weekly newsletter covering developments
in the Haskell community. Each week, new editions are posted to [1]the
Haskell mailing list as well as to [2]the Haskell Sequence and
[3]Planet Haskell. [4]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on
[5]haskell.org.
The 2006 Haskell Workshop was held today in Portland, Oregon. Thanks
to Edward Kmett for a report on the event.
1. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
2. http://sequence.complete.org/
3. http://planet.haskell.org/
4. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
5. http://haskell.org/
Announcements
* Haskell98 Termination Analyser . Stephan Swidersk [6]announced the
integration of an automatic Haskell98 termination analyzer in the
termination tool AProVE. The tool accepts full Haskell as
specified in the Haskell 98 Report and is available through our
web interface. [7]More
6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14193
7. http://aprove.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/
* Free theorems . Janis Voigtlaender [8]announced that Sascha Boehme
has done a project to implement the Reynolds/Wadler algorithm
generating theorems from polymorphic types, plus simplifications
and postprocessings for such free theorems. [9]More info
8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14160
9. http://haskell.as9x.info/
* Haddock/GHC SoC . David Waern [10]announced a short status report
of the "Port Haddock to use GHC" Summer of Code project. The GHC
modifications, are finished and will be included in the GHC head
repository soon.
10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14149
* AutoForms release 0.2 . Mads Lindstrøm [11]released AutoForms 0.2,
a library to ease the creation of GUIs. It does this by using
generic programming (SYB) to construct GUI components. [12]More
info
11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14148
12. http://autoforms.sourceforge.net/
* HSPClientside 0.2 . Joel Björnson [13]announced a new version of
HSPClientside (0.2) ,developed as a GSoC project during this
summer. HSPClientside is a Haskell Server Pages library for
generating JavaScript code. [14]More info
13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14133
14. http://darcs.haskell.org/SoC/hsp.clientside/
* SOE implementation based on Gtk2Hs . Duncan Coutts [15]Due to
popular demand the new SOE implementation based on Gtk2Hs is
[16]available. The rendering quality is better than the original
HGL version. [17]Here's a side-by-side comparison
15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14132
16. file://localhost/home/dons/dons/src/hwn/now
17. http://haskell.org/~duncan/gtk2hs/SOE-cairo.png
* The experimental GHCi debugger . Pepe [18]announced the results of
his SoC project, the experimental Haskell debugger. [19]More
details
18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14131
19. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/GHCiDebugger
* SmallCheck . Colin Runciman [20]released a prototype tool that is
similar in spirit, and in some of its workings, to QuickCheck.
SmallCheck is, though, based on exhaustive testing in a bounded
space of test values. [21]More info
20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14129
21. http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/smallcheck0.0.tar
* Frisby: composable, linear time parser for arbitrary PEG grammers
. John Meacham [22]released Frisby, an implementation of the
'packrat' parsing algorithm, which parse PEG grammars and have a
number of very useful qualities, they are a generalization of
regexes in a sense that can parse everything in LL(k), LR(k), and
more, including things that require unlimited lookahead, all in
guaranteed linear time. [23]More information
22. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14128
23. http://repetae.net/computer/frisby/
* HaskellNet . Jun Mukai [24]published a status report on the state
of his SoC project, HaskellNet
24. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14126
* GHC's new support engineer . Simon Marlow [25]announced that GHC
now has a full-time support engineer, Ian Lynagh (aka Igloo on
IRC). He'll be helping with all aspects of GHC, especially release
management, bug diagnosis and tracking, documentation, packaging,
and supporting other GHC hackers. Welcome Ian!
25. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14125
Haskell'
This section covers the [26]Haskell' standardisation process.
* [27]Writing / status teams - call for volunteers
* [28]do and if then else
* [29]map and fmap
* [30]All monads are functors
26. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
27. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1657
28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1599
29. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1625/focus=1625
30. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1590/focus=1590
Discussion
The Haskell Workshop . Here is a summary of the talks presented today at
the Haskell Workshop
* RepLib: A Library for Derivable Type Classes . Stephanie Weirich
[31]presented a neat library for generic traversals. It covered
just about everything you'd need and seemed pretty painless to
use. From the abstract:
Some type class instances can be automatically derived from the
structure of types. As a result, the Haskell language includes the
"deriving" mechanism to automatic generates such instances for a
small number of built-in type classes. In this paper, we present
RepLib, a GHC library that enables a similar mechanism for
arbitrary type classes.
31. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sweirich/RepLib/
* A Generic Recursion Toolbox for Haskell (Or: Scrap Your
Boilerplate Systematically) . Deling Ren and Martin Erwig
[32]talked about another generics library, with a neat core
"mother traversal" that abstracted over different data structure
traversals.
The Recursion Library for Haskell provides a rich set of generic
traversal strategies to facilitate the flexible specification of
generic term traversals. The underlying mechanism is the Scrap Your
Boilerplate (SYB) approach. Most of the strategies that are used to
implement recursion operators are taken from Stratego.
32. http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~erwig/reclib/
* Strong Types for Relational Databases . Alexandra Silva and Joost
Visser [33]presented a relational database Using the type system
to encode not only the types of fields it was joining, but a bit
more about their meaning and role in the key.
Type-level programming is used to maintain the consistency between
header and rows, and between functional dependencies and tables.
Type-level predicates are provided to check whether tables and
functional dependencies are in particular normal-forms, or not.
33. http://lmf.di.uminho.pt/wiki/pub/PURe/CoddFish/StrongTypesForRDBs-draft-04-03-2006.pdf
* Polymorphic Variants in Haskell . Koji Kagawa [34]presented a
paper on polymorphic variants in Haskell, describing some
interesting type system extensions.
In languages that support polymorphic variants, a single variant
value can be passed to many contexts that accept different sets of
constructors. Polymorphic variants are potentially useful for
application domains such as interpreters, graphical user interface
(GUI) libraries and database interfaces, where the number of
necessary constructors cannot be determined in advance.
34. http://guppy.eng.kagawa-u.ac.jp/~kagawa/PVH
* Extended Static Checking for Haskell . Dana Xu [35]gave a great
talk on ESC/Haskell, proving the partial correctness of programs
with compile time checks for pre/postcondition violations, and
using an external theorem prover to prove bits about arithmetic
expressions. Very practical stuff. The extended static checking is
beautiful in that it opens up a whole new arena in Haskell for
machine checkable documentation.
35. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~nx200/
* Running the Manual: An Approach to High-Assurance Microkernel
Development . Philip Derrin, Kevin Elphinstone, Gerwin Klein,
David Cock and Manuel M.T. Chakravarty [36]presented a microkernel
paper. This was really good. Before I saw the talk I really
questioned the judgement of prototyping a microkernel in Haskell.
Now I want to go prototype one myself.
We propose a development methodology for designing and prototyping
high assurance microkernels, and describe our application of it.
The methodology is based on rapid prototyping and iterative
refinement of the microkernel in a functional programming language.
36. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/DEKC+06.html
* Strongly Typed Memory Areas -- Programming Systems-Level Data
Structures in a Functional Language . Iavor S. Diatchki and Mark
P. Jones [37]gave a presentation on how you could extend the type
system to include an extra kind for physical memory regions and
data representations in memory, with endianness, and the like. He
implemented it in a kind of strict pseudo-Haskell, but the general
notation was pretty clean and would be usable for system level
programming in Haskell.
37. http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~diatchki/papers/haskell007-diatchki.pdf
* User-Level Transactional Programming in Haskell . Peter Thiemann
wrote on generalizing the interface for STM to other kinds of
database and user-interface transactions, where he gave up the
ability to automatically retry blocking on a changeset of TVars,
producing a kind of transaction that could actually fail and be
manually retried.
* An Extensible Dynamically-Typed Hierarchy of Exceptions . Simon
Marlow [38]presented an extensible exception hierarchy using type
classes.
In this paper we address the lack of extensibility of the exception
type in Haskell. We propose a lightweight solution involving the
use of existential types and the Typeable class only, and show how
our solution allows a fully extensible hierarchy of exception types
to be declared, in which a single overloaded catch operator can be
used to catch either specific exception types, or exceptions
belonging to any subclass in the hierarchy.
38. http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/papers/ext-exceptions.pdf
* Demo: Introducing the Haskell Equational Reasoning Assistant .
Andy Gill came in and did a really neat, high energy, demo of an
interactive equational reasoning/code refactoring tool. He
actually loaded up the application and showed it refactoring live.
* GenI: Natural Language Generation in Haskell . Eric Kow
[39]covered genI and gave a user's level overview of the features
in Haskell that are useful in real code. The natural language
generation stuff there was pretty nifty.
39. http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/08/87/87/PDF/haskell01-kow.pdf
* Demo: Typed Linear Algebra . Frederik Eaton covered a linear
algebra library with ATLAS and LAPACK bindings in Haskell that
uses type level enumerable values to provide its bounds. Neat
stuff.
* Demo: Interactive Debugging . David Himmelstrup unforutnately was
unable to present [40]his talk, due to illness. From the abstract:
Haskell's lazy nature is a large part of its beauty. Unfortunately,
laziness complicates debugging in the "stop, examine, continue"
sense, and hence tools such as Freja, Hat and Hood have risen. This
paper describes the implementation of a "stop, examine, continue"
debugger for Glasgow Haskell
40. http://darcs.haskell.org/~lemmih/hw2006.ps
* Demo: The Galois Haskell Program Coverage tool, HPC . A demo was
presented on how you can use HPC to interactively control
QuickCheck, get it to run some cases, and check to see how much
coverage you have had, then have it run more cases if thats not
enough. The notion of looking at the difference in the coverage
sets between a good run and a bad run to try to isolate bugs seems
really useful.
* Demo: On computable types . Oleg Kiselyov [41]presented a "proof
by example" that the Haskell type system is Turing complete, with
a 5 line type system lambda calculus and a 6 line type level
fibonacci.
41. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2006-September/018486.html
* Haskell' Status Report -- An Update on the Next Haskell Standard .
Isaac Jones Isaac gave a talk on the state of [42]Haskell'
42. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
Quotes of the Week
* Baughn : "I think I'm beginning to understand this language. I
just defined: let 1 + 1 = 3"
* SamB : "Haskell is the only language I know with first-class
support for imperative programming"
* David Amos : "The real reason for using Haskell is that the code
comes out shorter, and is quicker to write, than in imperative
languages .. What that means is, I can get much more done when I
use Haskell"
* SyntaxNinja : "I recommend seeing if people have a major problem,
then pouring concrete on them, and implementing what you want
anyway"
* SamB : "I was just saying that encasing poeple in concrete is not
the best solution to that problem"
* Sean Russell : "[On the wmii window manager mailing list] Hah!
That's a laugh. Since when does 'it compiles' equate to 'it will
run (correctly)'? We're talking about C, after all... not
Haskell."
* Adaptec : "[In documentation for one of their chipsets] We have a
disclaimer because there may be corner cases"
* audreyt : "Yes, I'm aware that I'm abusing GHC beyond its designed
purpose"
* cjeris : "I have a little perl script that aliases gcc
-freduced-suckage to ghc"
* dibblego : "Using logic in imperative programming language
channels is generally considered trolling"
* edwardk : "lambdabot is the first irc bot I ever added to my buddy
list"
* gmh33 : "Haskell makes so much more sense now and all I did was
figure out the typing thing"
* musasabi : "reallyUnsafePointerEq# seems unsafe"
* sieni : "The advantage of Haskell is that it doesn't suck"
* therp : "Good morning. I think I have been dreaming of shift/reset
continuations"
Contributing to HWN
To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
[43]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
43. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
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