Greetings, and thanks for reading the second issue of HWN, a weekly newsletter for the Haskell community. Each Tuesday, new editions will be posted (as text) to the Haskell mailing list and (as HTML) to The Haskell Sequence.
Practical Monads. Paul Moore started a discussion about Monads and resources for learning about them. Quite a few readers responded with suggestions.
STRef vs. IORef. Srinivas Nedunuri started a discussion by asking when to STRef and when to use IORef. Iavor Diatchki posted a helpful example, and many other helpful answers were posted as well.
Parsing Foreign Languages. The The ParsingForeignLanguagesInHaskell wiki page was the subject of a short discussion on the libraries mailing list. If you have any further information or would like to join or start a project to parse a particular language, see the wiki page.
Cabal was again a hot topic this week. There were discussions about data directories, running on Windows 98, and package description fields in general.
Darcs in FreshMeat. David Roundy is looking for volunteers to maintain the Darcs entry at FreshMeat.net. It wouldn't require much time, but the ability to summarize changes at release time.
Binary files and line endings. Phil Brooke asked how darcs handles line endings and binary files.
Uniqueness of patch names. On #darcs this week, a discussion about the uniqueness of low-level patch names in darcs. The consensus seemed to be that darcs needs an additional better-than-1-second component to patch names to eliminate a situation in which collisions can arise.
<CosmicRay> "Oh Lord, bless this thy holy IO monad, and use it for thy purposes that it may smash Java to tiny bits..." (with apologies to monty python)
<Pseudonym> If I ever write a GUI library for Haskell, I'm going to call it pointlesstif.
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