Haskell Weekly News: January 3, 2005

Greetings, and thanks for reading the 18th issue of HWN, a weekly newsletter for the Haskell community. Each Monday, new editions will be posted (as text) to the Haskell mailing list and (as HTML) to The Haskell Sequence.

This issue brings a change to the Haskell Weekly News as Don Stewart takes over from John Goerzen as editor. Thanks goes to John for his excellent work on the first 17 editions!

New Releases

• Process library. Bulat Ziganshin announced a new library abstracting over some of the process and concurrency functions in the standard libraries, using ideas from Unix pipes.
• Djinn. Lennart Augustsson released Djinn, a theorem prover/coding wizard, that generates Haskell code from a given type. A lambdabot plugin for Djinn was also written, for use in #haskell.
• Ranged Sets. Paul Johnson released a ranged sets library 0.0.1 and 0.0.2. Ranged sets allow programming with sets of values that are described by a list of ranges. A value is a member of the set if it lies within one of the ranges.
• Hmp3. Don Stewart announced a stable release of hmp3, an curses-based mp3 player written in Haskell. Portability has improved, and binaries are available for 5 architectures.
• HSQL. Krasimir Angelov released HSQL 1.7. New features include a driver for Oracle.
• HDBC. John Goerzen announced the 0.5.0, 0.6.0 and 0.99.0 releases of Haskell Database Connectivity library. Patterned after Perl's DBI, it includes an Sqlite3 and a PostgreSQL backend
• Shellac. Robert Dockins released Shellac, a framework for building read-eval-print style shells. This should ease the burden of binding readline-style interactive shells in Haskell.
• Lambda Shell. Robert Dockins also released v0.1 of Lambda Shell, a shell environment for evaluating terms of the pure, untyped lambda calculus. A lambdabot interface for use in #haskell also exists.
• Shaskell. David Mercer announced version 0.21a of Shaskell, a SHA2 library for sha256 and sha512 hashes, written in pure Haskell.
• hdbc-missingh. John Goerzen announced the initial release of HDBC-MissingH, a library to add database features to MissingH, allowing the use of a SQL database as storage for a simple DBM-like key/value interface.

Discussion

• Making Haskell More Open. Simon Peyton-Jones reinitiated a discussion on how to make Haskell more open, and in particular how to make it easier for Haskell users to contribute.
• The Unboxed Kind. Ashley Yakeley asked about creating type variables with unboxed kind. This lead to an interesting discussion about the difficulties that result, including the problems of polymorphic functions over unboxed values.

Haskell Toolchain

Fptools in Darcs. John Goerzen has set up live darcs mirrors of fptools, ready for testing. With over 13,000 patches in fptools, you'll want to use --partial.

Darcs Corner

• Darcs 1.0.5. A stable release of Darcs 1.0.5 was made. This release includes fixes for Windows, as well as some new features.
• darcsweb. Alberto Bertogli announced darcsweb 0.13, a rather lovely web interface to darcs repositories.

Quotes of the Week

    <sieni> State?
    <sieni> There is no state :-)
    <shapr> Haskell separates Church and state.
    

About Haskell Weekly News

Want to continue reading HWN? You can help us create new editions of this newsletter. Please see the contributing information, send stories to dons -at- cse.unsw.edu.au. The Darcs repository is available at darcs get http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/hwn