Haskell Weekly News: January 16, 2006

   Greetings, and thanks for reading the 20th 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

     * hdbc-odbc. John Goerzen [4]released the first version of
       hdbc-odbc, the ODBC backend for HDBC. With this driver, you can
       use HDBC to connect to any database for which ODBC drivers exist,
       including such databases as MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server

   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13007

Resources and Tools

     * Haskell Performance Resources. Simon Marlow [5]opened up a [6]wiki
       page to collect the community wisdom on writing high performance
       Haskell code. This is particularly relevant given the discussions
       regarding the language shootout recently, with many interesting
       techniques proposed.

   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13018
   6. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_Performance_Resource

Discussion

     * Arrays. Bulat Ziganshin [7]wrote an interesting RFC on the various
       Haskell array interfaces.

   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/12992

     * Functional Java. Graham Klyne [8]alerted us to [9]FunctionalJ, an
       open source library for functional programming in Java. This might
       be useful to those unfortunates trapped on the JVM. Additionally,
       Bjorn Bringert [10]mentioned a similar library, Higher-Order Java
       (HOJ), he wrote a few years ago.

   8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/10898
   9. http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=38430
  10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/10900

     * Data structures. Duncan Coutts was [11]looking for an efficient
       data structure to implement a sequence data type with indexed
       insert/delete/lookup.

  11. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13073

     * Language Shootout, continued. Many entries have been improved on
       the [12]Computer Language Shootout, and after several years of
       complaints that micro-benchmarks are meaningless, and that the
       tests are biased against purely functional languages, it's great
       to see that [13]Haskell is now ranked 2nd overall.

  12. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/
  13. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all

Darcs Corner

     * darcsweb 0.14. Alberto Bertogli [14]released darcsweb 0.14.

  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/9207

Quotes of the Week

    <palomer> grr, sml can't derive Ord
    <palomer> sml is a pain to use sometimes
    <palomer> but sometimes it's a joy!
    <palomer> ugh, I take it back, it's a pain

Contributing to HWN

   You can help us create new editions of this newsletter. Please see the
   [15]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

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