[Hat] ANN: hat-2.04, a Haskell Tracer

[Malcolm Wallace]

				hat-2.04
				--------
			http://haskell.org/hat/

We are pleased to announce a new release of Hat, the Haskell Tracer.
Hat is a very useful tool for understanding and debugging programs.
Hat is compiler independent, and can be used on any Unix-like platform.
It supports the full Haskell'98 language, plus hierarchical module
namespaces, and several type system extensions, namely: multi-parameter
type classes, functional dependencies, and existential quantification
of datatype declarations.

The main interactive trace browsers currently are hat-observe
and hat-trail, but many more experimental browsers are included
(see below).

Particular features of note in this new release, hat-2.04, are:

  * Supports compilers from ghc-5.04.2 and nhc98-1.18 upwards,
    now including the entire ghc-6 series.  As well as the usual
    Unix/Linux platforms, we believe it also works under MacOS X and
    Cygwin (but would value your feedback.)  We recommend you use
    'hmake' to manage compilation of your traced programs.

  * Support for a few more of the standard hierarchical library modules
    (although the tracing versions are still only a subset of the
    full list.)

  * Various improvements, such as recording full source positions
    in the trace rather than just start-positions, and recording
    do-notation, mean that visual linkage from the trace to your
    program is far more helpful.

  * A range of new (experimental) tracing tools:
        Interactive browsers: hat-anim, hat-explore, hat-detect
        Batch-mode tools: hat-cover, hat-nonterm, black-hat

  * Numerous small bug fixes.

See the website
    http://haskell.org/hat/
for full details.  There is a dedicated mailing list for bug-reports
and other discussion of Hat:
    http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/hat


Regards,
    The Hat team

[ The core Hat team currently consists of Olaf Chitil, Colin Runciman,
  and Malcolm Wallace with thanks to many other students, visitors,
  collaborators and reviewers.  The original development of Hat
  was funded by EPSRC grant number GR/M81953, with later additional
  support from the Universities of York, Kent, Aachen, and Microsoft
  Research (Cambridge).
]