[Haskell] ANN: Helium now available from Hackage

Jurriaan Hage J.Hage at uu.nl
Sat Sep 6 12:45:35 UTC 2014


Dear Haskellers,

I am happy to inform you that the programmer-friendly Helium Haskell compiler, known for its focus on error messages
and hints, domain specific type error diagnosis, and its compilation logging facility, is now available from Hackage.

All you need to do is

cabal install helium
cabal install lvmrun

and you should be ready to go. The system has been tested under various instances of Windows, Mac, and Linux.

To use Helium, there is a texthint program that is much like ghci (but less powerful), and a runhelium program
that behaves like runhaskell. 

NB. the Hint environment is not yet availalble in this way (and, being pure Java, I am not sure if we will make it 
available in this way), and the server for logging the compiled programs is also not made available in this way. 
If you have a need for either of these, please e-mail me. 

There is a website too:
   http://www.cs.uu.nl/foswiki/Helium/WebHome

To dispell one of the frequent misunderstandings about Helium: Helium DOES support a form of overloading.
But overloading is restricted to specific classes: Num, Eq, Ord, Show and Enum, with instances
for Eq and Show being derived, and for the others the instances are fixed. In other words: you can't write your own
classes and instances. If you want, you can turn overloading off entirely, and profit from better error messages.

Any feedback is appreciated. Replying to this e-mail will do, or mail us at helium at cs.uu.nl .

cheers,
Jurriaan Hage writing for the Helium Team

PS. no need to bother telling us about the warnings you get when compiling with GHC 7.8.x. We know about 
them, and they will be fixed in a future release. As it happens, we prepared this version of Helium with GHC 7.6.3.



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