Haskell Weekly News: August 9, 2005

   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 [1]the Haskell mailing list and (as HTML) to [2]The
   Haskell Sequence.

   1. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
   2. http://sequence.complete.org/

Discussion

   Practical Monads. Paul Moore started a [3]discussion about Monads and
   resources for learning about them. Quite a few readers responded with
   suggestions.

   3. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/7964

   STRef vs. IORef. Srinivas Nedunuri started a [4]discussion by asking when
   to STRef and when to use IORef. Iavor Diatchki posted a helpful
   [5]example, and many other helpful answers were posted as well.

   4. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/11895
   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/11901

   Parsing Foreign Languages. The The ParsingForeignLanguagesInHaskell wiki
   page was the subject of a short [6]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 [7]wiki page.

   6. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3572
   7. http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/ParsingForeignLanguagesInHaskell

Haskell Toolchain

   Cabal was again a hot topic this week. There were discussions about
   [8]data directories, [9]running on Windows 98, and [10]package description
   fields in general.

   8. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3594
   9. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3575
  10. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3566

Darcs Corner

   Darcs in FreshMeat. David Roundy is [11]looking for volunteers to maintain
   the Darcs [12]entry at FreshMeat.net. It wouldn't require much time, but
   the ability to summarize changes at release time.

  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/8034
  12. http://freshmeat.net/projects/darcs/

   Binary files and line endings. Phil Brooke [13]asked how darcs handles
   line endings and binary files.

  13. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/8017

   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.

New Releases

     * Simon Marlow announced the [14]release of Haddock version 0.7.
       Highlights of this version include improvements for linking across
       different packages, bug fixes, collapsable trees in HTML, and support
       for new output formats.
     * Einar Karttunen has released [15]hsgnutls 0.1, a Haskell binding for
       the GnuTLS SSL/TLS library.
     * John Goerzen [16]announced the release of a preliminary, but working,
       binding to OpenLDAP from Haskell.

  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/11903
  15. http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/ekarttun/hsgnutls/
  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/11932

Quotes of the Week

   <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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