Haskell Weekly News: February 20, 2006

   Greetings, and thanks for reading issue 25 of HWN, a weekly newsletter
   covering developments in 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

Announcements

     * The Haskell Workshop. Andres Loeh [4]released the initial call for
       papers for the ACM SIGPLAN 2006 [5]Haskell Workshop, to be held at
       Portland, Oregon on the 17 September, 2006.
       The purpose of the [6]Haskell Workshop is to discuss experience
       with Haskell, and possible future developments for the language.
       The scope of the workshop includes all aspects of the design,
       semantics, theory, application, implementation, and teaching of
       Haskell.

   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13273
   5. http://www.haskell.org/haskell-workshop/2006/
   6. http://haskell.org/haskell-workshop/

     * Probability Distributions. Matthias Fischmann [7]released a module
       for sampling arbitrary probability distribution, so far including
       normal (gaussian) and uniform distributions.

   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/11511

     * Constructor Classes. Sean Seefried [8]announced an
       [9]implementation of a tool to help explore constructor classes
       (type classes which can take constructors as arguments) described
       in Mark Jones' paper, [10]A system of constructor classes:
       overloading and implicit higher-order polymorphism. The
       implementation not only infers the type but also prints out a
       trace of the derivation tree for the syntax directed rules.

   8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/11543
   9. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~sseefried/code.html
  10. http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~mpj/pubs/fpca93.html

Haskell'

   This section covers activity on [11]Haskell' this week.

  11. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime

     * Status Report. Isaac Jones [12]released a Haskell' status report.
       There is a list of proposals and a "strawman" categorization of
       them on [13]the wiki. The [14]timeline is also on the wiki. You'll
       notice that it's very aggressive; we plan to announce something at
       the next Haskell Workshop in September. So, check out the wiki and
       get on the haskell-prime mailing list!

  12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/11506
  13. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
  14. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/TimeLine

     * [15]More on strictness
     * [16]FFI Pragmas
     * [17]Pattern synonyms
     * [18]The MPTC Dilemma
     * [19]Labels and the MPTC Dilemma
     * [20]The way forward
     * [21]Export lists
     * [22]First class labels
     * [23]Standardising the compiler interface
     * [24]An existential quantifier

  15. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/595
  16. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/589
  17. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/577
  18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/533
  19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/569
  20. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/567
  21. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/563
  22. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/560
  23. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/542
  24. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/557

Discussion

     * Commerical Use of Haskell. Seth Kurtzberg mentioned on the
       #haskell irc channel that he was in the process of deploying a
       commercial application written in Haskell onto a production line
       in Taiwan. The particular application stress tests hardware
       performance and stability.
       Seth writes:

        "Once the compiler finally does what I think I'm telling it, the
         programs almost always work the first time, which is really
         amazing. With any substantial effort in C or C++, you are going to
         have hidden problems traceable to type errors.

         Recently, the thing that I was most pleased with was how quickly I
         was able to refactor the hardware stress testing code into network
         performance testing code."

     * RFC: Class-based collections. Jean-Philippe Bernardy [25]released
       an rfc for his initial work on a [26]class-based collections
       framework. The main goal is to have something usable right now,
       making use of generally available haskell extensions for maximum
       usability/portability ratio (or rather product).

  25. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4291
  26. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/CollectionClassFramework

Darcs Corner

     * darcs 1.0.6. Tommy Pettersson [27]announced that the initial
       release candidate for Darcs 1.0.6 is available. It contains
       important bug fixes, some noticeable changes, and, of course, new
       features.

  27. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/9494

Contributing to HWN

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  28. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_Weekly_News