[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 126 - July 18, 2009

Brent Yorgey byorgey at seas.upenn.edu
Sat Jul 18 11:23:29 EDT 2009 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20090718
Issue 126 - July 18, 2009
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   Welcome to issue 126 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

   [2]Hac phi is next weekend! With almost 30 people already registered,
   it looks like we're going to have a fantastic time hacking in
   Philadelphia. It's still not too late to [3]register!

Announcements

   GHC 6.10.4. Ian Lynagh [4]announced a new patchlevel release of GHC,
   6.10.4. This version has very few changes over 6.10.3, but fixes some
   bugs that could be critical for a few users. See the [5]release notes
   for details.

   shelltestrunner 0.6 released. Simon Michael [6]announced the first
   release of [7]shelltestrunner, a small tool for testing any
   command-line program by running it through "shell" tests defined with a
   simple file format.

   generator 0.5.1. Yair Chuchem [8]announced the release of the
   [9]generator package, which implements an alternative list monad
   transformer, a list class, and related functions.

   GLURaw 1.0.0.0. Sven Panne [10]announced a new [11]GLURaw package,
   containing full support for all GLU functionality and similar in spirit
   to the OpenGLRaw package: it is a 1:1 mapping of the C interface, no
   libraries or headers are needed at build time, and the GLU API entries
   are resolved dynamically at runtime.

   OpenGLRaw 1.0.1.0. Sven Panne [12]announced a new version of the
   [13]OpenGLRaw package, which adds support for a number of OpenGL
   extensions.

   ObjectName 1.0.0.0. Sven Panne [14]announced a (tiny) new package,
   [15]ObjectName, which contains a class corresponding to the general
   notion of explicitly handled identifiers for API objects, e.g. a
   texture object name in OpenGL or a buffer object name in OpenAL.

   StateVar 1.0.0.0. Sven Panne [16]announced the [17]StateVar package,
   which further modularizes the OpenGL/OpenAL packages. It implements
   state variables, which are references in the IO monad, like IORefs or
   parts of the OpenGL state.

   data-ordlist-0.0.1 and NumberSieves-0.0. Leon Smith [18]announced the
   release of two new packages: [19]Data.OrdList offers a convenient way
   for efficiently dealing with lists that you happen to know are ordered,
   and includes operations such as union, merge, exclusive union,
   intersection, and difference. [20]NumberSieves includes the Sieve of
   O'Neill, from "The Geniune Sieve of Eratosthenes" by Melissa O'Neill,
   which offers an incremental primality sieve based on priority queues.
   Also included are two array-based generalizations of the Sieve of
   Eratosthenes: one for factoring a large quantity of small numbers, and
   another for calculating the phi function for a large quantity of small
   numbers.

   graphviz-2999.0.0.0. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic [21]announced a new release
   of the [22]graphviz package for Haskell, which provides bindings to the
   [23]GraphViz suite of tools. The biggest and most important change in
   this release is that all 152 attributes utilised/supported by GraphViz
   are now specified and supported.

   uncommon IMO problem - toilet management. Henning Thielemann
   [24]announced a [25]Haskell package for managing toilet use at the
   International Mathematical Olympiad.

   darcs 2.3 beta 4. Petr Rockai [26]announced another darcs 2.3 beta
   release, which features better Windows support. If you're on Windows,
   you should be able to install it with 'cabal install darcs-beta' --
   give it a try!

Google Summer of Code

   Progress updates from participants in the 2008 [27]Google Summer of
   Code.

   space profiling. Gergely Patai has been working on a [28]heap profile
   manager.

   fast darcs. Petr Rockai put out another [29]another darcs 2.3 beta
   release, and made a [30]bunch of other progress including getting darcs
   up and running on win32, working on hashed-storage, and optimizing
   'darcs show contents'.

Discussion

   is closing a class this easy? Conor McBride [31]asked for feedback on
   some code intended to effectively create a closed type class.

   laziness blowup exercise. Thomas Hartman [32]challenged readers to
   squash a memory leak.

Blog noise

   [33]Haskell news from the [34]blogosphere. Blog posts from people new
   to the Haskell community are marked with >>>, be sure to welcome them!
     * Gergely Patai: [35]Introducing the heap profile manager.
     * FP Lunch: [36]Folding Statistics.
     * Petr Rockai: [37]soc progress 8.
     * Greg Bacon: [38]Monadic takeWhile.
     * Petr Rockai: [39]darcs 2.3 beta 4.
     * David Amos: [40]Counting symmetries using transversals.
     * Magnus Therning: [41]XML prettifier in Haskell.
     * Petr Rockai: [42]soc progress 7.

Quotes of the Week

     * Berengal: For me, understanding the basics/reasoning behind
       haskell's type system was just a minute meditating on the phrase
       "what's the square root of hello?"
     * bitwize: The oleg is to functional studliness as the farad is to
       capacitance: a hopelessly large base unit.
     * maartenm: euclidate: to promote a conjecture to an axiom just for
       the sake of simplicity
     * RobertGreaye: Some suggest the original English remained in Britain
       when the North American colonies were founded; others claim it was
       brought to the Americas by the British settlers, leaving a pale
       imitation back in Britain. The truth is much stranger: the original
       English was actually smuggled out of Britain to the West Indies in
       a wardrobe belonging to General Sir Ralph Abercromby, where it
       ended up on the island of Trinidad after Sir Ralph took possession
       of that territory in the name of the British Crown.

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [43]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [44]the Haskell Sequence and [45]Planet Haskell. [46]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [47]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [48]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [49]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hac_%CF%86
   3. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hac_%CF%86/Register
   4. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell/2009-July/021508.html
   5. http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.10.4/html/users_guide/release-6-10-4.html
   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17367
   7. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/shelltestrunner
   8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17366
   9. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/generator
  10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17364
  11. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/GLURaw
  12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17363
  13. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/OpenGLRaw
  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17362
  15. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/ObjectName
  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17361
  17. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/StateVar
  18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17355
  19. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/data-ordlist
  20. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/NumberSieves
  21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61494
  22. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/graphviz
  23. http://www.graphviz.org/
  24. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61448
  25. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/toilet-0.0.1
  26. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61302
  27. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/SoC2008
  28. http://just-bottom.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-heap-profile-manager.html
  29. http://web.mornfall.net/blog/darcs_2.3_beta_4.html
  30. http://web.mornfall.net/blog/soc_progress_8.html
  31. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61456
  32. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61283
  33. http://planet.haskell.org/
  34. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  35. http://just-bottom.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-heap-profile-manager.html
  36. http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fplunch/weblog/?p=232
  37. http://web.mornfall.net/blog/soc_progress_8.html
  38. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gbacon/~3/Q-Y-KapB8iI/monadic-takewhile.html
  39. http://web.mornfall.net/blog/darcs_2.3_beta_4.html
  40. http://haskellformaths.blogspot.com/2009/07/counting-symmetries-using-transversals.html
  41. http://therning.org/magnus/archives/695
  42. http://web.mornfall.net/blog/soc_progress_7.html
  43. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  44. http://sequence.complete.org/
  45. http://planet.haskell.org/
  46. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  47. http://haskell.org/
  48. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  49. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/

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