Announce: Collection package pre-release.

[Jean-Philippe Bernardy]

Hello folks,

This is an announcement for an alpha release of the new collections
package I (and others, see below) have been working on. It's still far
from perfect, but I hope it's already a good choice for many use cases
of collection data structures. Also,  "release early, release often" :
I hope releasing now will allow me to keep a on improving it at a
steady rate.

Darcs repo: http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/collections/
Documentation: http://users.skynet.be/jyp/html/
(documentation for base package can be found there as well, for the
purpose of cross-referencing)

It is originally designed to depend on the upcoming version of the
base package; however I've arranged it to work with current version as
well. (Meaning you can use it as a cabal package with GHC 6.4)

Please try out and let me know what you think.

0.9rc1 release notes:

* Efficient AVL-tree based implementations of Set and Map (by Adrian Hey)
  * efficient conversion routines between those Sets and Maps

* Class-based Collection framework for abstracting over Collections,
Sequences, Maps, Sets.
  * Nicely corresponds to the current API.
     In a lot of cases, just removing the module prefix does the trick.
  * QuickCheck-based validation of the instances.
  * Benchmark suite
  * Adaptation of Ross Paterson's Foldable class to MPTC+FD.

* Trie data type, to map sequential types (eg. lists) to keys.

* Efficient Set type for enumerations. (David F. Place)

---
Cheers,
JP.