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http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20090712

Welcome to issue 125 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements

Announcing the new Haskell Prime process, and Haskell 2010. Simon Marlow announced the new and improved 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 announced the release of AspectAG, a library of strongly typed Attribute Grammars implemented using type-level programming.

Colour tutorial. Russell O'Connor announced a tutorial wiki page for the colour library.

Haskell Hack Day, Edinburgh, 30 August 2009. Eric Kow announced a 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 announced the release of sendfile-0.3, which includes a more general interface, updated documentation, and more.

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

darcs 2.3 beta 2. Petr Rockai announced that darcs 2.3 beta 2 is available for testing. It can be installed using the 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 announced the first version of 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. announced the next beta version 0.4 of 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 announced an early release of 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 here and here.

BostonHaskell: Next meeting - July 16th at MIT CSAIL Reading Room (32-G882). Ravi Nanavati announced the July meeting of the 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 announced the release of three packages: AC-Vector, which provides unboxed vectors of Doubles with arithmetic, dot product and cross product, and a few other useful items; AC-Colour, which provides two simple RGB color types, optimized for simplicity and speed; and AC-EasyRaster-GTK, a layer over Gtk2hs which provides easy pixel-twiddling functionality.

Google Summer of Code

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

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

space profiling. Gergely Patai's profile graphing application 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 another darcs 2.3 beta release, and has done more work on designing an efficient storage system.

Discussion

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

exercise - a completely lazy sorting algorithm. Petr Pudlak 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 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

• Petr Rockai: Designing Storage for darcs.

• >>> haskelladdict: Having fun sorting with Haskell.

• Jeff Heard: C2HS example: To save other people frustration.

• JP Moresmau: Mazes of Monad: 1.0.5 and (maybe) final version uploaded.

• Sean Leather: Fun and generic things to do with EMGM at the London HUG.

• Greg Bacon: Gyrigrams.

• Magnus Therning: Making a choice from a list in Haskell, Vty (part 2).

• Jeff Heard: A quick buster example.

• Jeff Heard: An ugly force-directed layout implementation.

• Petr Rockai: darcs 2.3 beta 2.

• Isaac Dupree: Cross-package documentation going well!.

• >>> dasuxullebt: I (don't) like Haskell.

• Holumbus: Some Hayoo! Improvements.

• David Amos: Conjugacy classes, part 2.

• Michael Snoyman: hack-handler-webkit.

• Dan Piponi (sigfpe): A Monad for Combinatorial Search with Heuristics.

• Greg Bacon: A programmable semicolon explained.

• Holumbus: Another Hayoo! Update.

• Gergely Patai: Remote profiling at your fingertips.

• The GHC Team: Visualising the Haskell package dependency graph.

• Bryan O'Sullivan: First steps with Haskell text API improvement.

• Paul Hudak: Haskell and the Arts.

• >>> John Gunderman: Haskell Cabal in Ubuntu.

• Sebastian Sylvan: 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 the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

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