Old news

News from 2006

2006-03-13

• Alternative to Text.Regex. Chris Kuklewicz announced an alternative to Text.Regex. While working on the language shootout, Chris implemented a new efficient regex engine, using parsec. It contructs a parser from a string representation of a regular expression.
• pass.net. S. Alexander Jacobson 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.

2006-03-06

• Haskell as a markup language. Oleg Kiselyov writes on using Haskell to represent semi-structured documents and the rules of their processing. SXML is embedded directly in Haskell, with an open and extensible set of `tags'. The benefit of this is of course in static type guarantees, such as prohibiting an H1 element to appear in the character content of other elements.
• hmp3 1.0. Don Stewart released hmp3 version 1. hmp3 is a curses-based mp3 player written in Haskell, designed to be fast, small and stable.
• Edison 1.2rc2. Robert Dockins announced the second release candidate for Edison 1.2 is now ready for comments.

2006-02-27

• Long Live Edison. Robert Dockins announced he had revived the Edison data structure code, and is maintaining a darcs repository, with a view to modernising the codebase.

2006-02-20

• The Haskell Workshop. Andres Loeh released the initial call for papers for the ACM SIGPLAN 2006 Haskell Workshop, to be held at Portland, Oregon on the 17 September, 2006. The purpose of the Haskell Workshop is to discuss experience with Haskell, and possible future developments for the language. The scope of the workshop includes all aspects of the design, semantics, theory, application, implementation, and teaching of Haskell.

2006-02-20

• Probability Distributions. Matthias Fischmann released a module for sampling arbitrary probability distribution, so far including normal (gaussian) and uniform distributions.
• Constructor Classes. Sean Seefried announced an implementation of a tool to help explore constructor classes (type classes which can take constructors as arguments) described in Mark Jones' paper, A system of constructor classes: overloading and implicit higher-order polymorphism. The implementation not only infers the type but also prints out a trace of the derivation tree for the syntax directed rules.

2006-02-13

• FFI Imports Packaging Utility. Dimitry Golubovsky announced the pre-release of the FFI Imports Packaging Utility (ffipkg), a new member of the HSFFIG package. The `ffipkg' utility prepares a Haskell package containing FFI imports for building by accepting locations of C header and foreign library files as command line arguments and producing Haskell source files with FFI declarations, a Makefile, a Cabal package descriptor file, and a Setup.hs file suitable for running the Cabal package setup program. The utility acts as a "driver" running the C preprocessor, the equivalent of the hsffig program, and the source splitter. darcs get --partial http://hsffig.sourceforge.net/repos/hsffig-1.1
• Haskell in Higher Education. John Hughes announced that the result of his survey into the use of Haskell in higher education are out. The survey covers 89 universities, accounting for 5-10,000 students being taught Haskell this academic year. The results are available on the web.

2006-02-06

• EclipseFP. Thiago Arrais announced that EclipseFP 0.9.1 has been released since last Friday. It is an open-source development environment for Haskell code. EclipseFP integrates GHC with an Haskell-aware code editor and also supports quick file browsing through an outline view, automatic building/compiling and quick one-button code execution. Downloads and more information are available on the project home page.
• Class-parameterized classes, and type-level logarithm. Oleg Kiselyov writes: we show invertible, terminating, 3-place addition, multiplication, exponentiation relations on type-level Peano numerals, where any two operands determine the third. We also show the invertible factorial relation. This gives us all common arithmetic operations on Peano numerals, including n-base discrete logarithm, n-th root, and the inverse of factorial. The inverting method can work with any representation of (type-level) numerals, binary or decimal. Oleg says, "The implementation of RSA on the type level is left for future work".
• Fast mutable variables for IO and ST. Bulat Ziganshin released a module for fast mutable variables, providing efficient newVar/readVar/writeVar, as well as support for unboxed values, fast unboxed bitwise operations, and more.

2006-01-30

• C-- Frontend. Robert Dockins announced the initial alpha release of a C-- frontend (parser, pretty printer, and semantic checker) written in Haskell. The goal when beginning this project was to create a modular frontend that could be used both by people writing and by those targeting C-- compilers. This implementation attempts to follow the C-- spec as exactly as possible.
• Type level arithmetic. Robert Dockins also released a library for arithmetic on the type level. This library uses a binary representation and can handle numbers at the order of 10^15 (at least). It also contains a test suite to help validate the somewhat unintuitive algorithms.

2006-01-23

• Haskell' This week Isaac Jones announced that the Haskell' standardisation process is underway. Haskell' will be a conservative refinement of Haskell 98:

  Announcing the Haskell' ("Haskell-Prime") process. A short time ago, I asked for volunteers to help with the next Haskell standard. A brave group has spoken up, and we've organized ourselves into a committee in order to coordinate the community's work. It will be the committee's task to bring together the very best ideas and work of the broader community in an "open-source" way, and to fill in any gaps in order to make Haskell' as coherent and elegant as Haskell 98.

     Read the full announcement here.
  

     Presently, the following resources are available:
  

  • The haskell-prime mailing list
  • The Haskell' issue tracking system/wiki
  • A darcs repository for larger code examples and experiments

     Please join us in making Haskell' a success.
  

2006-01-16

• hdbc-odbc. John Goerzen released the first version of hdbc-odbc, the ODBC backend for HDBC. With this driver, you can use HDBC to connect to any database for which ODBC drivers exist, including such databases as MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server

2006-01-09

• A Faster Binary. Bulat Ziganshin posted a preliminary optimised Binary library, achieving excellent (de)serialization speeds of around 50 Mb/s in testing.

2006-01-03

• Process library. Bulat Ziganshin announced a new library abstracting over some of the process and concurrency functions in the standard libraries, using ideas from Unix pipes.
• Djinn. Lennart Augustsson released Djinn, a theorem prover/coding wizard, that generates Haskell code from a given type. A lambdabot plugin for Djinn was also written, for use in #haskell.
• Ranged Sets. Paul Johnson released a ranged sets library 0.0.1 and 0.0.2. Ranged sets allow programming with sets of values that are described by a list of ranges. A value is a member of the set if it lies within one of the ranges.
• Hmp3. Don Stewart announced a stable release of hmp3, an curses-based mp3 player written in Haskell. Portability has improved, and binaries are available for 5 architectures.
• HSQL. Krasimir Angelov released HSQL 1.7. New features include a driver for Oracle.
• HDBC. John Goerzen announced the 0.5.0, 0.6.0 and 0.99.0 releases of Haskell Database Connectivity library. Patterned after Perl's DBI, it includes an Sqlite3 and a PostgreSQL backend
• Shellac. Robert Dockins released Shellac, a framework for building read-eval-print style shells. This should ease the burden of binding readline-style interactive shells in Haskell.
• Lambda Shell. Robert Dockins also released v0.1 of Lambda Shell, a shell environment for evaluating terms of the pure, untyped lambda calculus. A lambdabot interface for use in #haskell also exists.
• Shaskell. David Mercer announced version 0.21a of Shaskell, a SHA2 library for sha256 and sha512 hashes, written in pure Haskell.
• hdbc-missingh. John Goerzen announced the initial release of HDBC-MissingH, a library to add database features to MissingH, allowing the use of a SQL database as storage for a simple DBM-like key/value interface.

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