This sounds pretty cool and useful. How much of this can be implemented in a library and how much of this would need to be supported on a compiler level? Ideally, most of this would be solved on the library level.
Jurriën On 4 Apr 2012, at 13:38, Nils Schweinsberg wrote: > Hi Haskell-Cafe & GHC-users! > > I'm looking to apply for the GSoC and since I've worked on GHC before I'd > like to continue to do so. My proposal would be something that tempted me (as > a physics student) for a while: Units for Haskell/GHC. > > This project has been suggested for a long time on the GHC wiki, and there is > already a lot of work done for other languages like ML, F# etc[1]. I have > tried to implement e.g. the unification algorithm from the "Types for > Units-of-Measure in F#" talk[2] for an abstract syntax tree[3] and it was > pretty much straight forward. As I see it, the project would consist of: > > 1.) Find appropriate rules/algorithms for unit analysis. Most (if not all?) > of this should be covered in those papers/talks on [1]. > > 2.) Applying the rules to the Haskell syntax tree used in GHC. > > I have approximately 3 years of experience with Haskell, I worked for the > database research group[4] at the University of Tübingen (Germany) on the > Database Supported Haskell[5] library. I've done most of the coding for the > monad comprehension[6] extension, which has been added to the latest GHC > release version. I'm already quite familiar with the GHC internals of the > compiler/typechecker, and even though I'd have to look up how exactly type > interference etc. works in GHC (as I've only *used* it, but never tried to > understand/modify it) I'm confident that the work on GHC itself should be > doable in the given timeframe. > > So my questions would be: > > Do you think this is a appropriate GSoC project? > What should I include in the application/project proposal? > Anything else? Opinions, suggestions? > > I realize that I'm kind of late and probably should have written this email a > long time ago. But there are still 2 days left for the student application > and hopefully I'll get some good feedback by then. > > > > - Nils > > > > [1]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/akenn/units/index.html > [2]: > http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/akenn/units/MLWorkshop2008.pdf > [3]: https://github.com/mcmaniac/units/blob/master/src/Unification.hs > [4]: http://db.inf.uni-tuebingen.de/team > [5]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/DSH > [6]: http://db.inf.uni-tuebingen.de/files/giorgidze/haskell2011.pdf > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
