[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 73 - June 18, 2008

Brent Yorgey byorgey at seas.upenn.edu
Wed Jun 18 16:43:36 EDT 2008


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080618
Issue 73 - June 18, 2008
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   Welcome to issue 73 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

   The Google Summer of Code is in full swing, preparations are underway
   for ICFP and the eleventh ICFP Programming Contest, and cabal-install
   is oh-so-sexy. It's an exciting time to be a part of the Haskell
   community!

Community News

   Andy Gill has completed his move from Portland, OR to Kansas.

   Luke Palmer (luqui) has [2]begun work for [3]Anygma, Peter
   Verswyvelen's startup using Haskell (among other languages) to
   ``generate easy-to-use tools for creating audio-visual 2D/3D content.''

   Congrats to Andy and Luke on their new beginnings!

Announcements

   Final CFP: 2008 Haskell Symposium. Andy Gill [4]announced the final
   call for papers for the [5]2008 Haskell Symposium. The deadline is the
   23rd of this month; please submit a paper!

   cabal-install. Duncan Coutts [6]announced the release of
   [7]cabal-install-0.5, along with the release of Cabal-1.4 to support
   it. It features an improved command line interface, smarter upgrading,
   and is made of win. If you are still stuck in the dark ages of
   runhaskell Setup configure blah blah, then the imperative monkeys have
   already won.

   ICFP programming contest. Tim Chevalier [8]announced the eleventh
   annual [9]ICFP programming contest, to be held from Friday, July 11,
   2008 to Monday, July 14, 2008. Are you ready?

   c.h.o trac. Ian Lynagh [10]announced that it is now possible for
   projects on [11]community.haskell.org to [12]create themselves a trac,
   providing a bug tracking system and wiki.

   random-access-list. Stephan Friedrichs [13]announced an
   [14]implementation of Chris Okasaki's random-access lists, providing
   typical list operations (cons, head, tail) in O(1) and indexed
   random-access in O(log n).

   GHC version 6.8.3. Ian Lynagh [15]announced a [16]new patchlevel
   release of [17]GHC, containing a number of bugfixes relative to 6.8.2.

   Printf-TH. Marc Weber [18]announced that he has taken over maintenance
   of the [19]Printf-TH library, which implements a printf function via
   [20]Template Haskell, in order to guarantee that wrong argument types
   or the wrong number of arguments will result in compile time errors.

   Mueval. Gwern Branwen [21]announced the release of the [22]mueval
   package, providing a standalone executable for evaluating Haskell
   expressions based on the GHC API.

   Topkata. Christoph Bauer [23]announced the release of [24]Topkata, a
   simple OpenGL game written in Haskell. The goal is to guide a ball
   through a labyrinth to the opposite corner.

   Haddock Trac. David Waern [25]announced a new [26]bug-tracker and wiki
   for the [27]Haddock project.

   Fortress talk. Jeff Polakow [28]announced that a [29]talk on
   [30]Fortress, a new OO/functional language from Sun, will take place on
   Wednesday, June 25 at 6:30pm in Manhattan, New York, USA.

   ieee-0.2. Patrick Perry [31]announced the release of [32]ieee, a
   library that provides approximate comparison of floating point numbers
   based, NaN-aware minimum and maximum, and a type class for approximate
   comparisons.

Google Summer of Code

   Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is [33]working on Hoogle 4, recently
   adding support for generating Hoogle databases to [34]Haddock, using
   the GHC API. This week he plans to work on database creation and text
   searches.

   DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is [35]working on a
   physics engine using [36]Data Parallel Haskell, recently adding
   rotations, represented by quaternions. Next he plans to handle
   collisions properly with respect to rotation, and to add documentation.

   Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is writing a library for efficient maps
   using generalized tries. He has come up with a preliminary API and is
   [37]asking for feedback.

   Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a
   make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal, recently refining
   the core model, that has built its first sources in the testing
   environment. The next step will be dealing with preprocessor chaining.

   Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is working on Language.C, a
   standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. The test suite is
   finished, the parser and pretty printer support most GNU extensions,
   and all failing tests of gcc.dg are documented.

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

   GHC plugins. Maximilian Conroy Bolingbroke is working on dynamically
   loaded plugins for GHC.

Discussion

   Low-level array performance. Dan Doel began a [38]discussion about the
   [39]fannkuch benchmark and the current state of Haskell support for
   fast low-level array operations.

   1/0. Evan Laforge began a lively [40]discussion about Infinity, NaN,
   and Haskell's support for the IEEE floating-point standard.

   Documenting the impossible. Andrew Coppin began a [41]discussion on the
   relative merits of {-# IMPOSSIBLE #-} pragmas, calls to 'error' and
   'assert', the use of tools like [42]Catch, and other methods of
   annotating impossible cases.

Blog noise

   [43]Haskell news from the [44]blogosphere.
     * [45]PE Problem #1 in Haskell
     * [46]osfameron: Countdown words game solver in Haskell
     * [47]Algebraic Data Types in JavaScript
     * [48]Finance and Haskell
     * [49]Well-Typed.Com: New Cabal and cabal-install releases
     * [50]Neil Mitchell: GSoC Hoogle: Week 3
     * [51]Max Bolingbroke: Compiler Plugins For GHC: The First Week
     * [52]Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Categories of polynomials and comonadic
       plumbing
     * [53]Roman Cheplyaka: Status report: week 3
     * [54]Thomas DuBuisson (TomMD): Static Buffers Considered Harmful

Quotes of the Week

     * ddarius: Here's the short guide to Haskell for OO programmers:
       Haskell isn't at all an OO language.
     * swalters: I'm starting to believe that learning haskell is mostly
       about carefully crafting small and clever functions and then
       finding out that they are already part of the standard library.

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [55]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [56]the Haskell Sequence and [57]Planet Haskell. [58]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [59]haskell.org. Headlines are
   available as [60]PDF.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [61]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [62]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/06/18/new-job/
   3. http://anygma.com/
   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16249
   5. http://haskell.org/haskell-symposium/2008
   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cabal.devel/3267
   7. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/cabal-install
   8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16238
   9. http://icfpcontest.org/
  10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16241
  11. http://community.haskell.org/
  12. http://community.haskell.org/admin/using_project.html#trac
  13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16237
  14. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/random-access-list
  15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/14645
  16. http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.8.3/html/users_guide/release-6-8-3.html
  17. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/
  18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41293
  19. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Printf-TH
  20. http://www.haskell.org/th/
  21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41265
  22. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/mueval
  23. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41263
  24. http://home.arcor.de/chr_bauer/topkata.html
  25. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41249
  26. http://trac.haskell.org/haddock
  27. http://www.haskell.org/haddock/
  28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41235
  29. http://lisp.meetup.com/59
  30. http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/
  31. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41201
  32. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/ieee
  33. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/06/gsoc-hoogle-week-3.html
  34. http://www.haskell.org/haddock/
  35. http://physics-dph.blogspot.com/2008/06/status-report-week-3.html
  36. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell
  37. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9259
  38. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/14637
  39. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=fannkuch
  40. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41368
  41. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/41295
  42. http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~ndm/catch/
  43. http://planet.haskell.org/
  44. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  45. http://jdfrens.blogspot.com/2008/06/pe-problem-1-in-haskell.html
  46. http://osfameron.vox.com/library/post/countdown-words-game-solver-in-haskell.html
  47. http://w3future.com/weblog/stories/2008/06/16/adtinjs.xml
  48. http://blog.gmosx.com/2008/06/finance-and-haskell.html
  49. http://blog.well-typed.com/2008/06/new-cabal-and-cabal-install-releases/
  50. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/06/gsoc-hoogle-week-3.html
  51. http://blog.omega-prime.co.uk/2008/06/15/compiler-plugins-for-ghc-the-first-week/
  52. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/06/categories-of-polynomials-and-comonadic.html
  53. http://physics-dph.blogspot.com/2008/06/status-report-week-3.html
  54. http://tommd.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/static-buffers-considered-harmful/
  55. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  56. http://sequence.complete.org/
  57. http://planet.haskell.org/
  58. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  59. http://haskell.org/
  60. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/archives/20080618.pdf
  61. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  62. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/


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