Haskell Weekly News: March 13, 2006

   Greetings, and thanks for reading issue 28 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

     * Alternative to Text.Regex. Chris Kuklewicz [4]announced an
       alternative to Text.Regex. While working on the [5]language
       shootout, Chris implemented a new efficient regex engine, using
       parsec. It contructs a parser from a string representation of a
       regular expression.

   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/11825
   5. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all

     * pass.net. S. Alexander Jacobson [6]launched Pass.net. Written in
       Haskell, using HAppS, Pass.net lets websites replace registration,
       confirmation mails, and multiple passwords with a single login,
       authenticating via their email domain.

   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/11824

Haskell'

   This section covers activity on [7]Haskell'.
     * [8]Partial application syntax
     * [9]Extending the `...` notation
     * [10]The dreaded offside rule
     * [11]Strictness standardization

   7. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
   8. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/874
   9. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/881
  10. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/883
  11. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/901

Discussion

     * Non-trivial markup transformations. Further on last week's article
       on encoding markup in Haskell, Oleg Kiselyov [12]demonstrates
       non-trivial transformations of marked-up data, markup
       transformations by successive rewriting (aka, `higher-order tags')
       and the easy definition of new tags.

  12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13393

     * Popular libraries and tools. John Hughes [13]posted (and [14]here)
       some interesting figures on the most important libraries and
       tools, based on the results of his survey of users earlier this
       year.

  13. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/11829
  14. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/11875

     * haskell-prime fun. Just for fun, Ross Paterson [15]posted, some
       thought-provoking [16]statistics on haskell-prime traffic.

  15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/11831
  16. http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~ross/haskell-prime-stats/

     * New collections package. Jean-Philippe Bernardy [17]hinted that
       his new collections package is almost done.

  17. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cvs.ghc/13880

     * Is notMember not member? John Meacham [18]sparked a bit of a
       discussion on whether negated boolean functions are useful with a
       patch adding Data.Set and Data.Map.notMember.

  18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4411

     * Namespace games. In a similar vein, Don Stewart [19]triggered
       discussion on how to sort the hierarchical namespace, when
       proposing alternatives to the longish Text.ParserCombinators
       module name.

  19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4383

Darcs Corner

     * Darcs-server. Unsatisified with the current techniques for
       centralised development with darcs, Daan Leijen went ahead and
       [20]wrote darcs-server. With darcs-server you can:

          + push changes remotely via a CGI script
          + or push changes via a single SSH account that serves many
            users
          + use cryptographic verification and authorization of users for
            reading and writing
          + use gpg encryption (for CGI)
          + use non-public repositories that can only be accessed by
            authorized users.

  20. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/9686

     * darcsweb 0.15, by Alberto Bertogli, has been [21]released.

  21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/9664

Contributing to HWN

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  22. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN