Haskell Weekly News: January 9, 2006

   Greetings, and thanks for reading the 19th issue of HWN, a weekly
   newsletter for the Haskell community. Each Monday, new editions are
   posted to [1]the Haskell mailing list and to [2]The Haskell Sequence.
   [3]RSS is also available.

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

New Releases

     * A Faster Binary. Bulat Ziganshin [4]posted a preliminary optimised
       Binary library, achieving excellent (de)serialization speeds of
       around 50 Mb/s in testing.

   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/10803

Resources and Tools

     * Haskell mail. Simon Peyton-Jones has [5]put together a [6]complete
       archive of the Haskell mailing list since its birth in Sept 1990
       until Oct 2000 -- the date where the [7]current mailman archive
       takes over. This is a valuable resource for the community.

   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12948
   6. http://research.microsoft.com/%7Esimonpj/haskell/haskell-email-11Sep1990-27Oct2000.gz
   7. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell/

     * haskell.org. John Peterson is [8]seeking comments on the
       haskell.org move to MediaWiki. Currently only the [9]front page is
       finished, and its time for comments. In the end this will allow
       anyone to come in and fix up the main haskell.org pages - the
       people, the projects, the help for beginners, all of it. One job
       that will be needed is to move the current hawiki contents onto
       MediaWiki. Feel free to start adding stuff to the new haskellwiki.

   8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12981
   9. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell

Discussion

     * Language Shootout. [10]Discussion took place on on haskell-cafe to
       improve the performance of the Haskell entries. This process has
       greatly improved some entries. Haskell is now [11]the fastest
       entry for the concurrency benchmark, Chameneos. More can still be
       done. Some entries are being worked on [12]here. The problems are
       quite short, and fairly easy to solve, so fire up the profiler and
       hack!

  10. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/10663
  11. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/benchmark.php?test=chameneos&lang=all
  12. http://haskell.org/hawiki/ShootoutEntry

     * MonadZero. Cale Gibbard [13]opened a discussion about reinclusion
       of MonadZero, and removal of `fail' from the Monad class, citing
       the overuse of monadic typing to indicate the possibility of
       failure as one of the problems. Instead, MonadZero should be used
       for failure. [14]References were made to the discussions that took
       place on this issue during the Haskell 98 process.

  13. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12930
  14. http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Haskell/Messages/Decision.cgi?id=2

     * History channel. On a similar theme, an expedition took place on
       #haskell into functions and classes from earlier implementations
       of Haskell that had disappeared by Haskell 98. Of particular
       interest was the Eval class, and various things in the
       [15]constructor class prelude from Gofer, such as:

            class (Functor f, Functor g) => NatTransf f g where
                eta :: f a -> g a

       and fun definitions like:

            undefined :: a
            undefined | False = undefined

  15. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/cc.prelude

Darcs Corner

   A darcs gui. Eric Kow [16]proposed resurrecting the darcs wxhaskell
   gui for a new darcs gui.

  16. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/9189

Quote of the Week

* autrijus stares at
  type Eval x = forall r. ContT r (ReaderT x IO) (ReaderT x IO x)
  and feels very lost
<shapr> Didn't you write that code?
<autrijus> yeah. and it works
<autrijus> I just don't know what it means.

Contributing to HWN

   You can help us create new editions of this newsletter. Please see the
   [17]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

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