[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 125 - July 12, 2009

Brent Yorgey byorgey at seas.upenn.edu
Sun Jul 12 12:08:04 EDT 2009


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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20090712
Issue 125 - July 12, 2009
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   Welcome to issue 125 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

Announcements

   Announcing the new Haskell Prime process, and Haskell 2010. Simon
   Marlow [2]announced the new and improved [3]Haskell Prime process, and
   a list of proposals which are currently under consideration to be
   accepted into the next (2010) revision of the standard.

   AspectAG 0.1.1. Marcos Viera [4]announced the release of [5]AspectAG, a
   library of strongly typed Attribute Grammars implemented using
   type-level programming.

   Colour tutorial. Russell O'Connor [6]announced a [7]tutorial wiki page
   for the [8]colour library.

   Haskell Hack Day, Edinburgh, 30 August 2009. Eric Kow [9]announced a
   [10]Haskell Hack Day to be held in Edinburgh, on Sunday 30 August,
   before ICFP. The Hack Day will be held at the ICFP conference venue,
   the Royal College of Physicians.

   sendfile-0.3. Matthew Elder [11]announced the release of
   [12]sendfile-0.3, which includes a more general interface, updated
   documentation, and more.

   Gtk2hsGenerics. Michael Dever [13]announced the release of
   [14]Gtk2hsGenerics, a package which contains utility functions for
   extracting from and adding to stores.

   darcs 2.3 beta 2. Petr Rockai [15]announced that darcs 2.3 beta 2 is
   available for testing. It can be installed using the [16]darcs-beta
   package on Hackage (be sure to 'cabal update' first). The new beta
   release adds index upgrade functionality to hashed-storage, and now
   uses an architecture-independent index format.

   hsparql, a SPARQL query generator/DSL and client. Jeff Wheeler
   [17]announced the first version of [18]hsparql, which makes it easy to
   query SPARQL-compliant servers using a relatively intuitive DSL and
   very simple client. SPARQL is a SQL-ish query language for stores of
   RDF data.

   Hayoo! beta 0.4. Timo B. [19]announced the next beta version 0.4 of
   [20]Hayoo!, the Haskell API search engine with find-as-you-type and
   suggestions. This release includes some major changes to the web
   interface, including the ability to display the full description of a
   function, and some example queries featured on the start page, as well
   as an updated search index.

   texmath 0.1.0.1 - conversion of LaTeX math to MathML. John MacFarlane
   [21]announced an early release of [22]texmath, a Haskell library for
   converting LaTeX math formulas to MathML. The package includes a
   standalone test program, testTeXMathML, and a CGI script, texmath-cgi,
   that can be used in web apps. You can see demos of the script [23]here
   and [24]here.

   BostonHaskell: Next meeting - July 16th at MIT CSAIL Reading Room
   (32-G882). Ravi Nanavati [25]announced the July meeting of the
   [26]Boston Area Haskell Users' Group, to be held Thursday, July 16th
   from 6:30pm - 8:30pm in the MIT CSAIL Reading Room. Scheduled talks
   include "An Introduction to GHC Hacking" by Alec Heller, and "Haskell
   on the iPhone" by Ryan Trinkle. There are still openings for Lightning
   Talks (5-minute talk, 2-minute Q&A). See the announcement for more
   details.

   AC-Vector, AC-Colour and AC-EasyRaster-GTK. Andrew Coppin [27]announced
   the release of three packages: [28]AC-Vector, which provides unboxed
   vectors of Doubles with arithmetic, dot product and cross product, and
   a few other useful items; [29]AC-Colour, which provides two simple RGB
   color types, optimized for simplicity and speed; and
   [30]AC-EasyRaster-GTK, a layer over Gtk2hs which provides easy
   pixel-twiddling functionality.

Google Summer of Code

   Progress updates from participants in the 2008 [31]Google Summer of
   Code.

   Haddock improvements. Isaac Dupree has had a [32]good deal of success
   getting cross-package documentation to work, with a few remaining loose
   ends.

   space profiling. Gergely Patai's profile graphing application [33]is
   now capable of connecting to a profile relay server that can broadcast
   the heap profile of its associated process on the fly, so it is now
   possible to attach an observer to a program that was started earlier.
   He now plans to shift to working on a history manager.

   fast darcs. Petr Rockai has produced [34]another darcs 2.3 beta
   release, and has done more work on [35]designing an efficient storage
   system.

Discussion

   Leaner Haskell.org frontpage. haskell [36]proposed a new design for the
   haskell.org front page. Bikeshedding ensues, news at 11.

   exercise - a completely lazy sorting algorithm. Petr Pudlak [37]asked
   whether it is possible to write a lazy sorting algorithm which allows
   access to the kth item of the sorted output in linear time, for all k.
   An interesting discussion and mind-expanding code followed.

   Implementing Las Vegas algorithms in Haskell. Matthias Görgens began a
   [38]discussion on implementing Las Vegas algorithms, which use a source
   of randomness but have results which are still deterministic. What
   should the type of such functions be? Is it OK to use unsafePerformIO
   in their definition?

Blog noise

   [39]Haskell news from the [40]blogosphere. Blog posts from people new
   to the Haskell community are marked with >>>, be sure to welcome them!
     * Petr Rockai: [41]Designing Storage for darcs.
     * >>> haskelladdict: [42]Having fun sorting with Haskell.
     * Jeff Heard: [43]C2HS example: To save other people frustration.
     * JP Moresmau: [44]Mazes of Monad: 1.0.5 and (maybe) final version
       uploaded.
     * Sean Leather: [45]Fun and generic things to do with EMGM at the
       London HUG.
     * Greg Bacon: [46]Gyrigrams.
     * Magnus Therning: [47]Making a choice from a list in Haskell, Vty
       (part 2).
     * Jeff Heard: [48]A quick buster example.
     * Jeff Heard: [49]An ugly force-directed layout implementation.
     * Petr Rockai: [50]darcs 2.3 beta 2.
     * Isaac Dupree: [51]Cross-package documentation going well!.
     * >>> dasuxullebt: [52]I (don't) like Haskell.
     * Holumbus: [53]Some Hayoo! Improvements.
     * David Amos: [54]Conjugacy classes, part 2.
     * Michael Snoyman: [55]hack-handler-webkit.
     * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [56]A Monad for Combinatorial Search with
       Heuristics.
     * Greg Bacon: [57]A programmable semicolon explained.
     * Holumbus: [58]Another Hayoo! Update.
     * Gergely Patai: [59]Remote profiling at your fingertips.
     * The GHC Team: [60]Visualising the Haskell package dependency graph.
     * Bryan O'Sullivan: [61]First steps with Haskell text API
       improvement.
     * Paul Hudak: [62]Haskell and the Arts.
     * >>> John Gunderman: [63]Haskell Cabal in Ubuntu.
     * Sebastian Sylvan: [64]Ray tracing signed distance functions.

Quotes of the Week

     * SimonPJ: [re: class constraints on data declarations] In GHC's
       source code these contexts are consistently called stupid_theta.
     * JN: this tutorial just introduced _|_ and called it bottom. I
       assume that's because it looks like an ass?
     * uman: so you can pass functions around as objects... this sounds
       like JavaScript
     * Twey: Mr. Wing, sir, if you are listening: you have the I.Q. of a
       semolina pudding. And your homepage is full of <font> tags. I'm not
       sure which is the greater insult, but at least one is objectively
       true.
     * jmcarthur: #haskell: Overwhelmingly helpful.
     * lilac: class Monad m where / return and Kleisli compose / must form
       a monoid <lilac> that's my new monad tutorial haiku <jmcarthur> i
       think that is the best monad tutorial i have ever read
     * dcoutts: make sure happy is on your path and it'll all be ok
     * ski: my answer to that is : don't deduce, denote!
     * roco: guys i have problem, does anybody know programming ?
     * dhjdhj: All new features added to C++ are intended to fix
       previously new features added to C++

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [65]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [66]the Haskell Sequence and [67]Planet Haskell. [68]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [69]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [70]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [71]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell/2009-July/021472.html
   3. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/Process
   4. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell/2009-July/021475.html
   5. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/AspectAG
   6. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-July/064065.html
   7. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Colour
   8. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/colour
   9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17345
  10. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hac7
  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17343
  12. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/sendfile
  13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17336
  14. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Gtk2hsGenerics
  15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61071
  16. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/darcs%2Dbeta
  17. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61062
  18. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hsparql
  19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61060
  20. http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/hayoo
  21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61049
  22. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/texmath
  23. http://johnmacfarlane.net/texmath.xhtml
  24. http://johnmacfarlane.net/texmath.html
  25. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61003
  26. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Boston_Area_Haskell_Users%27_Group
  27. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/60944
  28. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/AC-Vector
  29. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/AC-Colour
  30. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/AC-EasyRaster-GTK
  31. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/SoC2008
  32. http://haddock2009.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/cross-package-documentation-going-well/
  33. http://just-bottom.blogspot.com/2009/07/remote-profiling-at-your-fingertips.html
  34. http://web.mornfall.net/blog/darcs_2.3_beta_2.html
  35. http://web.mornfall.net/blog/designing_storage_for_darcs.html
  36. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61082
  37. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/60981
  38. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/60998
  39. http://planet.haskell.org/
  40. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  41. http://web.mornfall.net/blog/designing_storage_for_darcs.html
  42. http://haskelladdict.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/having-fun-sorting-with-haskell/
  43. http://vis.renci.org/jeff/2009/07/10/c2hs-example-to-save-other-people-frustration/
  44. http://jpmoresmau.blogspot.com/2009/07/mazes-of-monad-105-and-maybe-final.html
  45. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/splonderzoek/~3/qnt94yp_Er4/fun-and-generic-things-to-do-with-emgm.html
  46. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gbacon/~3/QKPjQ0Fxl_4/gyrigrams.html
  47. http://therning.org/magnus/archives/689
  48. http://vis.renci.org/jeff/2009/07/09/a-quick-buster-example/
  49. http://vis.renci.org/jeff/2009/07/09/an-ugly-force-directed-layout-implementation/
  50. http://web.mornfall.net/blog/darcs_2.3_beta_2.html
  51. http://haddock2009.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/cross-package-documentation-going-well/
  52. http://uxul.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/i-dont-like-haskell/
  53. http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/blog/?p=24
  54. http://haskellformaths.blogspot.com/2009/07/conjugacy-classes-part-2.html
  55. http://blog.snoyman.com/2009/07/08/hack-handler-webkit/
  56. http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/07/monad-for-combinatorial-search-with.html
  57. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gbacon/~3/UGYWKr-huLY/programmable-semicolon-explained.html
  58. http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/blog/?p=23
  59. http://just-bottom.blogspot.com/2009/07/remote-profiling-at-your-fingertips.html
  60. http://ghcmutterings.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/visualising-the-haskell-package-dependency-graph/
  61. http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2009/07/06/first-steps-with-haskell-text-api-improvement/
  62. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/haskell-arts-paul-hudak
  63. http://sporkcode.wordpress.com/2009/07/05/haskell-cabal-in-ubuntu/
  64. http://sebastiansylvan.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!4469F26E93033B8C!173.entry
  65. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  66. http://sequence.complete.org/
  67. http://planet.haskell.org/
  68. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  69. http://haskell.org/
  70. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  71. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/


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