Welcome to issue 45 of HWN, a weekly newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

A big week, with a swag of new releases, including the long awaited GHC 6.6.

Announcements

• GHC version 6.6. The GHC Team announced a new release of GHC! There have been many changes since the 6.4.2 release. For details, see the release notes. Binary builds, source and packages are all found at GHC's home.

• Haddock version 0.8. Simon Marlow announced Haddock 0.8, including: cabalisation, Hoogle support, image inclusion. Read more.

• Pugs 6.2.13 released. Audrey Tang announced that after nearly four months of development and 3400+ commits, Pugs 6.2.13, the leading Perl6 implementation written in Haskell, is now available.

• STM invariants and exceptions. Tim Harris announced that new transactional memory features have been committed to GHC. The main change is to add support for dynamically checked data invariants of the kind described in this paper (pdf). There are two operations: always X :: STM Bool -> STM () and alwaysSucceeds X :: STM a -> STM (). More details in here (pdf).

• Cabal version 1.1.6 is now available. Duncan Coutts announced that Cabal, the common architecture for building applications and libraries, version 1.1.6 is now available. It is included in GHC version 6.6.

• Fun in the Afternoon: Thurs 16th Nov in Oxford. Jeremy Gibbons announced that he, Graham Hutton and Conor McBride at Nottingham are organizing a seminar, Fun in the Afternoon, on functional programming and related topics. The idea is to have a small number of talks as an antidote to mid-term blues, three afternoons a year. The hope is that talks will be informal and fun, and that there will be plenty of scope for discussion and chat as well. Looks fun!

• HC&A Call for Contributions. Andres Loeh asked for contributions towards the 11th Haskell Communities & Activities Report, a bi-annual overview of the state of Haskell as well as Haskell-related projects of all flavours.

• Generic Haskell version 1.60 (Diamond). Utrecht's Generic Haskell Team announced a new release of Generic Haskell, an extension of Haskell that facilitates generic programming. Generic Haskell includes: type-indexed values and type-indexed types. The Generic Haskell compiler takes Generic Haskell source and produces Haskell code. This release adds support for Generic Views.

• Streams 0.1 available for GHC 6.6. Bulat Ziganshin announced that the Streams 0.1 library is now compatible GHC 6.6.

Haskell'

• (Pattern) Guards in lambdas

Discussion

• GADT terminology. Oleg Kiselyov argued that the term GADT should be reserved for truly generalised algebraic data types, and not just normal data types written in GADT syntax.

• Extended functionality for record field accessors. Henning Thielemann proposed some record system extensions.

Jobs

• Senior Back-end Web Application Developer. Lime Wire. PhD a plus, extra credit for knowing Haskell.

Blog noise

• First Steps with Haskell for Web Applications
• Haskell and Personal Publishing Platform Ramblings
• A type-based solution to the 'strings problem'
• 5 Principles For Programming
• The Misguided Faith in Unit Tests
• The functional language that?s right under your nose
• Games, Strategies and the Self-Composition of the List Monad
• Flapjax - Functional Reactive Ajax
• Haskell-style parser combinators in Factor: s-expression reader
• Concepts behind the C# 3.0 language
• Explicit Typing, Trail Blazing, and Packrat Parsing
• What is so cool about Functional Programming?

Quotes of the Week

• M. David Peterson : With the help of our friendly local ex-professors and Haskell geeks Dr. Meijer and Dr. Lämmel, I have learned to stop worrying and love monad comprehensions
• SamB: O(n^2) is better than O(hair-gone)
• chessguy: I didn't think Pennsylvania had anybody cool enough to know Haskell in it
• int-e: What, unsafeCoerce# is kind-preserving? How boring!
• lennart: Floating point numbers are terrible. I maintain that before using them people should have an floating point drivers license
• xerox: #haskell is a good code optimizer.
• sigfpe: Haskell is so strict about type safety that randomly generated snippets of code that successfully typecheck are likely to do something useful, even if you've no idea what that useful thing is.

About the Haskell Weekly News

Each week, new editions are posted to the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

The Haskell Weekly News is also available in Spanish translation.

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