Old news

News from 2007

2007-01-31

• lhs2tex 1.12. Andres Loeh announced lhs2TeX version 1.12, a preprocessor to generate LaTeX code from literate Haskell sources. lhs2TeX includes the following features: highly customized output; liberal parser; generate multiple versions of a program or document from a single source; active documents: call Haskell to generate parts of the document (useful for papers on Haskell); a manual explaining all the important aspects of lhs2TeX.

• hscom. Krasimir Angelov announced the hscom library. This is a FFI library for Microsoft COM. It is far from complete and it doesn't have automatic IDL to Haskell translator but if you have ever thought to start writing you own COM library for Haskell then please take a look. It is designed to be as close as possible to the standard FFI library for C.

• DeepArrow 0.0: Arrows for 'deep application'. Conal Elliott announced the birth of DeepArrow, a Haskell library for composable 'editors' of pure values. DeepArrow enables 'deep function application' in two senses: deep application of functions and application of deep functions. These tools generalize beyond values and functions, via the DeepArrow subclass of the Arrow type class.

• Phooey 0.1: functional user interface library. Conal Elliott announced version 0.1 of Phooey, an arrow-based functional user interface library. New in version 0.1: documentation, text input, boolean input/output, mtl. Phooey is now used in TV.

• TV 0.0: Tangible Values. Conal Elliott announced TV, a library for composing tangible values (TVs): values that carry along external interfaces. In particular, TVs can be composed to create new TVs, and they can be directly executed with a friendly GUI, a process that reads and writes character streams, or many other kinds interfaces. Values and interfaces are combined for direct use, and separable for composability. See the project page.

• polyparse 1.00. Malcolm Wallace announced the release of PolyParse, a collection of parser combinator libraries in Haskell. They were all previously distributed as part of HaXml, but are now split out to make them more widely available.

• Data.Binary: binary serialisation. The Binary Strike Force announced the release of Binary, a high performance, pure binary serialisation library for Haskell. It is available from Hackage and darcs. The 'binary' package provides efficient serialisation of Haskell values to and from lazy ByteStrings. ByteStrings constructed this way may then be written to disk, written to the network, or further processed (e.g. stored in memory directly, or compressed in memory with zlib or bzlib).

• DrIFT 2.2.1: support for Data.Binary. John Meacham announced that DrIFT 2.2.1 is out and now has support for the Data.Binary module.

• A History of Haskell. Simon Peyton-Jones mentioned that the paper 'A History of Haskell: being lazy with class', authored by Paul Hudak, John Hughes, Phil Wadler and Simon, is finally done. You can get a copy now!

• piggybackGHC 0.1. Martin Grabmueller announced the release 0.1 of piggybackGHC, a small utility package for using GHC for lexing and parsing Haskell source code. The library uses the GHC library for all the hard stuff, so all supported GHC extensions are available.

• regex-tdfa 0.20. Chris Kuklewicz announced regex-tdfa, a 'tagged' DFA regular expression backend in pure Haskell, along with a suite of updates to the existing regex packages.

• hpaste.org. Eric Mertens announced 'hpaste', the Haskell Pastebin. Developed over a few days by many of the members of the Haskell irc channel, it provies a reliable paste bot with Haskell-specific capabilities.

2007-01-09

• Happy: LALR(1) parser generator. Simon Marlow announced version 1.16 of Happy, the parser generator system for Haskell. Changes from version 1.15 to 1.16 include switching to Cabal, a new %error directive, new production forms, and attribute grammar support. Happy version 1.16 is required for building GHC version 6.6 and later.

• Alex: lexical analyser generator. Simon Marlow announced version 2.1.0 of Alex. Changes in Alex 2.1.0 vs. 2.0.1 include switching to Cabal, and slight changes to the error semantics.

• rdtsc: reading IA-32 time register. Martin Grabmueller announced version 1.0 of package rdtsc has just been released. This small package contains one module called 'Rdtsc.Rdtsc', providing the function 'rdtsc' for accessing the 'rdtsc' machine register on modern IA-32 processors. This is a 64-bit counter which counts the number of processor cycles since the machine has been powered up. Using this instruction, you can make very precise time measurements which are independent of the actual CPU frequency.

• monadLib 3.0. Iavor Diatchki announced a new version of monadLib, a collection of standard monad implementations. Some of the changes compared to the previous version: the whole library is in a single module MonadLib.hs (~500 lines); simpler and more symmetric API; removed the (generic) monadic combinators; removed the search transformer; rewrote some transformers in the 'traditional' way (exceptions and output); there is an optional module that defines base monads corresponding to each transformer.

• Shellac 0.6. Robert Dockins announced a simultaneously release of the following related packages: Shellac 0.6 Shellac-readline 0.3 and Shellac-vty 0.1. Shellac is a framework for building read-eval-print style shells which uses configurable backend plugins. The major new feature of this release is the new Shellac-vty backend package, which uses the new Vty library terminal I/O directly. It currently has basic line editing keybindings, paging, and a command history. The main package and Shellac-readline updates consist of minor API updates.

• IntelliJIDEA for Haskell. Tony Morris announced syntax highlighting support for Haskell in IntellijIDEA, released under a BSD licence.

• Yampa + GADT for GHC 6.6. Joel Reymont announced a cabalized version of Yampa + GADT for GHC 6.6. Joel also sought comments on cabalisation, testing and example for this package.

• HNOP. Ashley Yakeley updated the status of HNOP, the Haskell library for doing nothing. It has recently been split into two Cabal packages: 'nop', a library of no-op services, and 'hnop', a program that uses nop to do nothing. Both packages can be found in darcs. The two packages are intended to be templates for Cabal projects, so I'm interested in making them as canonical and 'best practices' for packaging libraries and executables.

2007-01-02

• hscolour-1.6. Malcolm Wallace announced HsColour, a popular syntax-highlighter for Haskell code. It can generate ANSI terminal colour codes, HTML, and CSS, and can insert hyperlink anchors for function definitions (useful in conjunction with Haddock). HsColour-1.6 is now available. The major addition is a new LaTeX output mode.

• Dimensional: Statically checked physical dimensions. Björn Buckwalter announced version 0.1 of Dimensional, a module for statically checked physical dimensions. The module facilitates calculations with physical quantities while statically preventing e.g. addition of quantities with differing physical dimensions.

• vty 2.0. Stefan O'Rear announced a new major version of vty. Differences from 1.0 include: vty now uses a record type for attributes, instead of bitfields in an Int; vty now supports setting background colors; you can now explicitly specify 'default' colors; vty now supports Unicode characters on output, automatically setting and resetting UTF-8 mode.

• 'Lambda Revolution' tshirts. Paul Johnson announced the creation of a new Haskell tshirt, on the theme of 'The Lambda Revolution'. Tshirts are available from CafePress, and the designs are freely available.

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