Welcome to issue 104 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.
Andre Pang (ozone) will be soon moving to San Fransisco to begin work with Pixar!
Mutually recursive modules. Henning Thielemann announced a small writeup explaining how mutually recursive modules are currently supported, and how they can be avoided. Please add information about other compilers and more ideas on breaking cycles.
UrlDisp, a friendly URL dispatching library. Artyom Shalkhakov announced the first release of UrlDisp, a small library for URL dispatching (aka routing). Right now it works with CGI, and should be compatible with FastCGI as well (not tested); Happstack compatibility is planned. Documentation and usage examples are available.
Purely functional LU decomposition. Rafael Gustavo da Cunha Pereira Pinto released some code to perform purely functional LU decomposition.
Ready for testing: Unicode support for Handle I/O. Simon Marlow announced that proper Unicode support in Handle I/O is ready for testing in GHC. Just download the set of patches, compile GHC with them, and test away! Comments and discussion welcome.
HaskellWiki Accounts. Ashley Yakeley can create a HaskellWiki account for anyone who wants one (account creation has been disabled as a spam-fighting measure).
multiplicity 0.1.0 released. Dino Morelli announced the release of multiplicity 0.1.0, a configuration file driven wrapper around duplicity. It allows you to easily define backup sets as config files and avoid long, repetitive command lines.
Happstack 0.1 Released!. Matthew Elder announced the 0.1 release of Happstack, the successor for the HAppS project.
#haskell-in-depth IRC channel. Philippa Cowderoy announced the creation of a new IRC channel, #haskell-in-depth. The new channel is open to everyone, just like #haskell, but is intended for more in-depth conversations, to allow the #haskell channel to be a more newbie-friendly place.
regex-posix-unittest-1.0 AND regex-posix-0.94.1 AND regex-tdfa-0.97.1. ChrisK announced an update to the regex-posix package which provides better semantics for multiple matches; an update to the regex-tdfa package, which provides the same new multiple match semantics and fixes a bug; and finally, a new package, regex-posix-unittest, along with an accompanying wiki page; it runs a suite of unit tests which regex-tdfa passes, but reveals bugs in the standard glibc, OS X, FreeBSD, and NetBSD implementations!
Jane Street Summer Project 2009. Yaron Minsky announced the Jane Street Summer Project for 2009, the goal of which is to make functional programming languages into better practical tools for programming in the real world. Students will be funded over the summer to work on open-source projects which aim at improving the practical utility of their favorite functional language.
gitit 0.5.1. John MacFarlane announced the release of gitit 0.5.1, a wiki program that uses git or darcs as a filestore and HAppS as a server. Changes include major code reorganization, bug fixes, new debugging features, and more.
regex-xmlschema. Uwe Schmidt announced the release of regex-xmlschema, (yet another) package for processing text with regular expressions, containing a complete implementation of the W3C XML Schema specification language for regular expressions.
diagrams 0.2. Brent Yorgey announced version 0.2 of the diagrams package, an embedded domain-specific language for creating simple graphics in a compositional style. New features include support for arbitrary paths, text, multiple output formats, and support for the colour library.
Haddock Markup. David Waern began a discussion on Haddock markup syntax: should it support (La)TeX for embedded mathematics? Should it support other stuff?
Elegant & powerful replacement for CSS. Conal Elliott began a discussion on an elegant replacement for CSS that is consistent, composable, orthogonal, functional, and based on an elegantly compelling semantic model---what might such a thing look like?
type metaphysics. Gregg Reynolds began a long and interesting discussion on the type system, denotational semantics, and related matters.
Postdoc Positions at the CLIP group, Spain. CFP announced the availability of postdoctoral research positions within the CLIP (Computational Logic, Implementation and Parallelism) group in Madrid, Spain. The application deadlines are February 13th and 18th; see the original email for more details.
Multiple funded Ph.D. positions available. Martin Erwig announced the availability of multiple funded Ph.D. positions in the school of EECS at Oregon State University, in the areas of programming languages (focusing on DSLs and language design), software engineering, and HCI. If you are interested, email Martin with a resume and contact information by February 15.
Erik de Castro Lopo: libsndfile 1.0.18..
>>> Gregg Reynolds: Moggi :: CT -> Hask. An interesting perspective on Haskell and category theory.
Osfameron: Functional Pe(a)rls v2 (now with Monads!) at the London Perl Workshop 2008.
ezekiel smithburg: google code project, google group, and darcs repository for WikimediaParser.
ezekiel smithburg: releasing WikimediaParser 0.1.
Andre Pang (ozone): Change.
Lennart Augustsson: Is Haskell fast?.
Lennart Augustsson: Regression. A library for writing embedded BASIC programs in Haskell? What is the world coming to?
Galois, Inc: Equivalence and Safety Checking in Cryptol.
GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Just Testing.
Jeff Heard: Hieroglyph: Interactively graph a spreadsheet in 99 lines of code..
Jeff Heard: Snippet: sorting the elements of a map.
LHC Team: Grin a little..
Alex Mason: Other shootout news.
Xmonad: contribs review: SpawnOn.
Jeff Heard: Hieroglyph Haddock docs.
Alex Mason: More n-bodies speedups.
Alex Mason: N-bodies evolution.
Eric Kow (kowey): practical quickcheck (wanted). Eric is seeking practical advice on how to effectively use QuickCheck.
Alex Mason: TextMate haskell bundle improvements.
"Haskell application server stack": Happstack 0.1 Released (one day early!).
"Haskell application server stack": SOCALFP presentation: patch-tag as a startup using Happstack.
Neil Mitchell: Monomorphism and Defaulting.
Jeff Heard: Hieroglyph Part II, basic mouse/keyboard interactivity.
Jeff Heard: Introducing Hieroglyph. Purely functional 2D visualization on top of Cairo.. The Hieroglyph library looks pretty cool!
Jeff Heard: Hieroglyph HOWTO, part I: Sparklines.
Alex Mason: N-bodies speedup (50%!).
>>> John Lato: Build a better WAVE reader, pt 2.
GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Join Points.
Luke Palmer: Parallel Rewrite System.
>>> John Lato: Build a better WAVE reader, pt 1. Notes on building an 'optimal audio I/O library in Haskell'.
Luke Palmer: Dana update: System U-Box compiler is go.
Luke Palmer: Dana needs a self-embedding of U-Box.
Beelsebob: Simulating n-bodies and functional programming. A beautiful implementation of an n-bodies simulation using reactive.
Xmonad: New layout: GridVariants.SplitGrid.
Lane: Christopher Lane Hinson: MaybeArrow?. An arrow with possible failure, which still allows later effects to happen after failure.
Don Stewart (dons): #haskell is a busy place. Some statistics on the #haskell IRC channel.
Alson Kemp: Cabal-install is awesome. Enough said!
FP-Syd: Sydney FP Group: FP-Syd #11..
Brent Yorgey: Diagrams 0.2 release.
Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Beyond Regular Expressions: More Incremental String Matching. More incremental brain expansion courtesy of Dan.
Don Stewart (dons): Reviving the Gofer Standard Prelude (circa. 1994). Haskell, retro-style!
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