Haskell Weekly News: January 30, 2006

   Greetings, and thanks for reading the 22nd 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

     * C-- Frontend. Robert Dockins [4]announced the initial alpha
       release of a [5]C-- frontend (parser, pretty printer, and semantic
       checker) written in Haskell. The goal when beginning this project
       was to create a modular frontend that could be used both by people
       writing and by those targeting C-- compilers. This implementation
       attempts to follow the C-- spec as exactly as possible.

   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13174
   5. http://www.cminusminus.org/

     * Type level arithmetic. Robert Dockins [6]also released a library
       for arithmetic on the type level. This library uses a binary
       representation and can handle numbers at the order of 10^15 (at
       least). It also contains a test suite to help validate the
       somewhat unintuitive algorithms.

   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13206

Haskell'

   This section covers activity on [7]Haskell' this week. The topics this
   week have been diverse. Next week we'll try to cover activity on the
   wiki as well. From the mailing list:
     * [8]Wildcard type annotations
     * [9]Reworking the Numeric class
     * [10]Partial application ideas
     * [11]A more flexible hierarchical module namespace
     * [12]Record updates
     * [13]On the importance of libraries
     * [14]Syntactic support for existentials
     * [15]Module system/namespace management
     * [16]Fixing the monomorphism restriction
     * [17]k patterns
     * [18]~ patterns
     * [19]Kind annotations
     * [20]Class method types
     * [21]A Match class
     * [22]Scoped type variables in class instances
     * [23]Inline comment syntax

   7. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
   8. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000001.html
   9. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000002.html
  10. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000004.html
  11. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000009.html
  12. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000014.html
  13. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000023.html
  14. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000031.html
  15. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-January/000032.html
  16. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/15
  17. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/31
  18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/54
  19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/65
  20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/102
  21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/123
  22. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/28
  23. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/104

Discussion

     * Adding Impredicative Types to GHC. Simon Peyton-Jones [24]pushed a
       patch into GHC to handle impredicative polymorphism (see [25]Boxy
       types: type inference for higher-rank types and impredicativity).
       Secondly, GHC now supports GADTs in the more simplified way
       described in [26]Simple unification-based type inference for GADTs

  24. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cvs.ghc/13254
  25. http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/boxy/
  26. http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/gadt/

     * New IO library. Bulat Ziganshin [27]sought information on the
       low-level IO mechanisms used in GHC's IO libraries, in the context
       of his work on a high-performance IO lib. Some interesting points
       relating to IO primitives were raised.

  27. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/9261

Darcs Corner

   Darcs is popular. Isaac Jones [28]brought to our attention the results
       of the Debian package popularity contest. For the first time a
       program written in Haskell is more popular than the Haskell
       toolchain itself. Congratulations to the darcs developers!

  28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/11089

Quote of the Week

    <araujo> Haskell is bad, it makes you hate other programming languages.

Contributing to HWN

   You can help us create new editions of this newsletter. Please see the
   [29]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

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