[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 82 - August 20, 2008

Brent Yorgey byorgey at seas.upenn.edu
Wed Aug 20 14:18:08 EDT 2008


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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080820
Issue 82 - August 20, 2008
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   Welcome to issue 82 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

Announcements

   Lava2000 on Hackage. Emil Axelsson [2]announced that [3]Lava2000 has
   been uploaded to Hackage. Lava is a structural hardware description
   library embedded in Haskell. This version of Lava focuses on
   verification, and connects to a number of different verification
   engines (although only Smv and Satzoo are maintained in this version).

   QuickCheck and HPC Tutorial. Andy Gill [4]announced a half day tutorial
   on QuickCheck and HPC to be held at [5]DEFUN, taught by Andy Gill and
   Koen Claessen. The latest version of QuickCheck will also be released
   in conjunction with the tutorial.

   Compiler Construction course using Haskell?. Johannes Waldmann
   [6]announced that he plans to give a course in compiler construction,
   using Haskell as the implementation language. Any comments are
   appreciated, especially from anyone who has given or taken such a
   course.

   witness 0.1, open-witness 0.1. Ashley Yakeley [7]announced the release
   of these new packages and the draft paper on which they are based.

   posix-realtime 0.0.1. Vasili Galchin [8]announced the release of the
   posix-realtime package.

   benchpress 0.2.1. Johan Tibell [9]announced the first public release of
   [10]benchpress, a micro-benchmark library that produces statistics such
   as min, mean, standard deviation, median, and max execution time.

   wavconvert 0.1.1. Tim Chevalier [11]announced the release of
   [12]wavconvert, a tool which takes a directory tree as an argument, and
   converts any .wav files in it to .ogg (using an external OGG encoder)
   while filling in the ID3 tags based on the directory names.

   darcs hacking sprint (25-26 October). Eric Y. Kow [13]announced a darcs
   hacking sprint, to be held on the 25-26 of October, in Cambridge and
   Portland (and over IRC). The perfect opportunity to get involved, if
   you are interested in doing some hacking on darcs. Let Eric know if you
   are interested.

   X Haskell Bindings. Antoine Latter [14]announced that he is slowly
   [15]porting XCB (the X C Bindings) to Haskell, and would like input
   from any interested parties.

   logfloat. wren ng thornton [16]announced the release of the logfloat
   package for manipulating log-domain floating numbers. The main reason
   for casting numbers into the log-domain is to prevent underflow when
   multiplying many small probabilities as is done in Hidden Markov Models
   and other statistical models often used for natural language
   processing. The log-domain also helps prevent overflow when multiplying
   many large numbers.

   Roguestar 0.2.2. Christopher Lane Hinson [17]announced the release of
   version 0.2.2 of Roguestar.

Google Summer of Code

   Progress updates from participants in the 2008 [18]Google Summer of
   Code.

   Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on [19]Hoogle 4. [20]This
   week, he worked on getting out the last kinks to make [21]Hoogle 4
   usable as a replacement for [22]Hoogle 3. Although this is the last
   official week of the GSoC, he plans to continue working on it when he
   has time.

   DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a
   [23]physics engine using [24]Data Parallel Haskell.

   GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins
   for GHC.

   Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a
   [25]make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal.

   Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is [26]working on Language.C, a
   standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99.

   Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps
   using generalized tries.

   GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on [27]improvements to
   the GHC API.

Jobs

   Platform Architect at Peerium, Inc.. Don Stewart [28]forwarded a job
   opportunity for a Haskell programmer at [29]Peerium, Inc. Peerium is
   building a new software platform for direct, real-time communication
   and collaboration within graphically rich environments, and is looking
   for a platform architect proficient in Haskell to work with the
   founders to design and implement components of the runtime and
   supporting libraries for our software platform. Resumes should be
   forwarded to hr [30]peerium.com.

Blog noise

   [31]Haskell news from the [32]blogosphere.
     * Don Stewart: [33]The 500 Packages: Haskell, Distros, and
       Maintainership.
     * Neil Mitchell: [34]Hoogle New Features. Neil has finished his
       Google Summer of Code work on the [35]new version of Hoogle, but
       still intends to continue working on it when he gets the chance. A
       number of new features have been added.
     * Well-Typed.Com: [36]Solving the diamond dependency problem. Duncan
       explains how the newest version of Cabal (mostly) solves the DDDP
       (dreaded diamond dependency problem).
     * Real-World Haskell: [37]Two new chapters, preorder links, and a
       page count estimate. Two new beta chapters are up!
     * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [38]Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part
       1. Dan continues his fascinating series on rational tangles,
       showing how to describe a tangle using do-notation.
     * Christopher Lane Hinson: [39]ANN: Roguestar 0.2.2.
     * Luis Araujo: [40]Himerge (and Haskell) out to the street!.
     * Neil Mitchell: [41]GSoC Hoogle: Week 12.
     * Twan van Laarhoven: [42]A generic merge function.
     * Luke Palmer: [43]Slicing open the belly of the IO monad in an
       alternate universe. Luke explores methods of safely performing some
       I/O without the IO monad in the context of FRP.
     * Ketil Malde: [44]The wee beginnings of a biohaskell tutorial? --
       and some thoughts on programming productivity.
     * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [45]Using Difference Lists.
     * Real-World Haskell: [46]Mid-August status update.

Quotes of the Week

     * SimonM: People don't seem to believe me when I say this. In
       retrospect we shouldn't have called it forkOS, we should have
       called it forkReallyExpensiveOnlyNecessaryForCallingOpenGL_IO.
     * quicksilver: unsafeInterleaveIO gives you a way to cheat if you're
       happy to descend into a mire of programs with no semantics.
     * dmhouse: Eurgh, metastereo quotes.
     * quicksilver: [on @yhjulwwiefzojcbxybbruweejw] it's the noise a
       haskell developer makes if you kick him in the de bruijn index.

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [47]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [48]the Haskell Sequence and [49]Planet Haskell. [50]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [51]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [52]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [53]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16381
   3. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/chalmers-lava2000
   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16380
   5. http://www.deinprogramm.de/defun-2008/
   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16379
   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16376
   8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43295
   9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43292
  10. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/benchpress
  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43282
  12. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/wavconvert
  13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43240
  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43230
  15. http://community.haskell.org/~aslatter/code/xhb
  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43211
  17. http://blog.downstairspeople.org/2008/08/16/ann-roguestar-022/
  18. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/SoC2008
  19. http://code.haskell.org/hoogle/
  20. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/08/gsoc-hoogle-week-12.html
  21. http://haskell.org/hoogle/beta
  22. http://haskell.org/hoogle
  23. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hpysics
  24. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell
  25. http://code.haskell.org/~Saizan/cabal
  26. http://www.sivity.net/projects/language.c/wiki/
  27. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GhcApiStatus
  28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43175
  29. http://www.peerium.com/
  30. file://localhost/home/brent/haskell/hwn/at]
  31. http://planet.haskell.org/
  32. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  33. http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2008/08/21#the_500
  34. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/08/hoogle-new-features.html
  35. http://haskell.org/hoogle/
  36. http://blog.well-typed.com/2008/08/solving-the-diamond-dependency-problem/
  37. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/08/18/two-new-chapters-preorder-links-and-a-page-count-estimate/
  38. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/08/untangling-with-continued-fractions_16.html
  39. http://blog.downstairspeople.org/2008/08/16/ann-roguestar-022/
  40. http://araujoluis.blogspot.com/2008/08/himerge-and-haskell-out-to-street.html
  41. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/08/gsoc-hoogle-week-12.html
  42. http://twan.home.fmf.nl/blog/haskell/generic-merge.details
  43. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/08/14/slicing-open-the-belly-of-the-io-monad-in-an-alternate-universe/
  44. http://blog.malde.org/index.php/2008/08/14/the-wee-beginnings-of-a-biohaskell-tutorial-and-some-thoughts-on-programming-productivity/
  45. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/08/using-difference-lists.html
  46. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/08/13/mid-august-status-update/
  47. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  48. http://sequence.complete.org/
  49. http://planet.haskell.org/
  50. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  51. http://haskell.org/
  52. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  53. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/


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