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 [1]the Haskell mailing list and (as HTML) to
   [2]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!

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

New Releases

     * Process library. Bulat Ziganshin announced a [3]new library
       abstracting over some of the process and concurrency functions in
       the standard libraries, using ideas from Unix pipes.

   3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12728

     * Djinn. Lennart Augustsson [4]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.

   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12747

     * Ranged Sets. Paul Johnson released a [5]ranged sets library 0.0.1
       and [6]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.

   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12749
   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12827

     * Hmp3. Don Stewart [7]announced a stable release of hmp3, an
       curses-based mp3 player written in Haskell. Portability has
       improved, and binaries are available for 5 architectures.

   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12787

     * HSQL. Krasimir Angelov released [8]HSQL 1.7. New features include
       a driver for Oracle.

   8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12798

     * HDBC. John Goerzen announced the [9]0.5.0, [10]0.6.0 and
       [11]0.99.0 releases of Haskell Database Connectivity library.
       Patterned after Perl's DBI, it includes an Sqlite3 and a
       [12]PostgreSQL backend

   9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12820
  10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12833
  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/1286
  12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12843

     * Shellac. Robert Dockins [13]released Shellac, a framework for
       building read-eval-print style shells. This should ease the burden
       of binding readline-style interactive shells in Haskell.

  13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12823

     * Lambda Shell. Robert Dockins also released v0.1 of [14]Lambda
       Shell, a shell environment for evaluating terms of the pure,
       untyped lambda calculus. A lambdabot interface for use in #haskell
       also exists.

  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12824

     * Shaskell. David Mercer [15]announced version 0.21a of Shaskell, a
       SHA2 library for sha256 and sha512 hashes, written in pure
       Haskell.

  15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12863

     * hdbc-missingh. John Goerzen [16]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.

  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12896

Discussion

     * Making Haskell More Open. Simon Peyton-Jones reinitiated a
       [17]discussion on how to make Haskell more open, and in particular
       how to make it easier for Haskell users to contribute.

  17. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12804

     * The Unboxed Kind. Ashley Yakeley [18]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.

  18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12849

Haskell Toolchain

   Fptools in Darcs. John Goerzen has [19]set up live darcs mirrors of
   fptools, ready for testing. With over 13,000 patches in fptools,
   you'll want to use --partial.

  19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12694

Darcs Corner

     * Darcs 1.0.5. A stable release of [20]Darcs 1.0.5 was made. This
       release includes fixes for Windows, as well as some new features.

  20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/9009

     * darcsweb. Alberto Bertogli [21]announced darcsweb 0.13, a rather
       lovely web interface to darcs repositories.

  21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/9072

Quotes of the Week

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


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  22. http://sequence.complete.org/hwn-contrib