Welcome to issue 43 of HWN, a weekly newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

The proceedings of the first Haskell Workshop are now available online, and work has begun on a unified library for generics in Haskell.

Announcements

• Proceedings Haskell Workshop 1995. Henrik Nilsson announced that in celebration of the 10th Haskell Workshop that took place recently, the proceedings of the very first Haskell workshop, in La Jolla 1995, have now been made available on the Haskell Workshop home page. Thanks to Paul Hudak for help locating the proceedings and arranging for them to be scanned into PDF.

• Common library for generic programming. Johan Jeuring and Andres Loeh announced an initiative to design a common library for generic programming, which should work together with most of the Haskell compilers, and for which they hope to guarantee support for generics in Haskell into the future. If you want to get involved (or just want to see the discussion), you can subscribe to the generics mailing list. Check the Haskell research wiki for some background on generics.

• GHC 6.6 Second Release Candidate. Ian Lynagh announced that the Second Release Candidate phase for GHC 6.6 is underway. Get testing!

• Lazy functional language for the JVM. Luke Evans announced that the research group at Business Objects has developed a lazily evaluated, strongly-typed language called CAL, with many similarities to Haskell, targeting the JVM, to facilitate representing certain kinds of business logic as reusable, composable pieces.

Haskell'

• Pattern guards
• Improving pattern guard syntax

Discussion

• Typeclass versus Prolog programming. Oleg Kiselyov wrote further on the connection between typeclass hacking and logic programming.

• Irrefutable patterns for existential types. Several Haskellers discussed, in a long thread, issues relating to irrefutable patterns when combined with existentials or GADTs. Read more.

• GHC on the Mac. Simon Peyton-Jones sought contributors to help maintain GHC on the Mac.

• Smallest Double. Tamas Papp initiated a thread regarding finding the smallest Double such that 1+x /= x, for a numerics problem.

• Migrating content to the new wiki. Ian Lynagh forced an action to finally close down the old hawiki, and move all content to the new haskell wiki. Work to be done is here.

Blog noise

• Functional programming for the rest of us
• Coming soon: Perl 6
• Arrows, like monads, are monoids
• OOP is dead

Quotes of the Week

• Bill Wood: It became obvious that when a Prolog program is tuned by removing non-determinism it moves towards a functional program.
• Bjarne Stroustrup: Any verbose and tedious solution is error-prone because programmers get bored. [S 9.4 of C++, 2nd edition]
• Hamilton Richards: It's fair to say that functional programming requires a very different mind-set, but once you've mad e the `jump`, programming in conventional languages feels like doing arithmetic in Roman numerals.
• Larry Wall: Take Lisp, you know it's the most beautiful language in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along.
• dons: Welcome to computer science, we count from 0.
• glguy: This is like Web 5GL. I like it!
• sjanssen: Quoth the Prelude, Chapter 6, verse 4: Yeah verily shall repeat floweth cons cells over.

Code Watch

• Fri Sep 29 09:07:17 PDT 2006 simonpj. Remove Linear Implicit Parameters, and all their works. Linear implicit parameters have been in GHC quite a while, but we decided they were a mis-feature and scheduled them for removal. This patch does the job.

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.

To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the 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