[Haskell] Any interest in the 'biohaskell.org' domain?
Hi, Some years ago, I set up the biohaskell.org domain with mailing list, wiki, etc, in order to collect bioinformatics tools, utilities, and libraries written in our favorite languages. Time has moved on, and I with it, and I am no longer doing (much) bioinformatics, and (sadly) also less Haskell. Now it is time to renew the domain again, and I wonder if there is any interest in it? If you would like to take it over or just want to see it continued existence, please send me an email and let me know. If I hear nothing, I'll unceremoniously let it pass away. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell mailing list Haskell@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell
Re: [Haskell-cafe] abs minBound (0 :: Int) negate minBound == (minBound :: Int)
fact 0 = 1 fact n = n * fact (n-1) Now I ran it as fact 100 with signature Int - Int and with Integer - Integer In the first case I got 0 in about 3 seconds [...] And if that sounds like a unreal argument, consider representing and storing Graham's number. So, since computers are finite anyway, we can just arbitrarily (well, almost) redefine large constants, and set all factorials above some threshold to zero? Perhaps we should also set pi=3, that would simplify lots of things :-) Pragmatically: 32-bits is unwise for a bank-balance, 64 should be a bit more safe Please start a bank using modulo arithmetic, I'm looking forward to overdrafting my account! So yes, Haskell's Int, should have been called FastInt or Int29 or somethin' On a more serious note, I accept that Int (and other limited precision numbers) is a fact of life, and sometimes useful for performance reasons. I would have liked, however, to have a compiler option or some other way to make my programs throw an exception on overflow - even if this turned out to be slower, I could at least use it when testing my programs, which would have caught a few bugs. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] abs minBound (0 :: Int) negate minBound == (minBound :: Int)
Richard A. O'Keefe o...@cs.otago.ac.nz writes: I think a better argument for twos complement is that you're just doing all of your computations modulo 2^n (where n is 32 or 64 or whatever), and addition and multiplication work as expected modulo anything. To me, that's not a better argument. It isn't even a _good_ argument. It amounts to saying if you do things wrong, you can justify it by saying you're really doing something else right, and it's the programmer's fault for wanting the wrong thing. Not only that, but in Haskell, you don't really know 'n', it is only specified to be at least 23, or something like that. Which basically means that any code that relies on this behaviour without rigorously checking it basically is wrong. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Compiling stringable with GHC 7.0.4
I took the liberty of implementing this fix and uploading stringable-0.1.1.1 to HackageDB. I tested it on GHC 7.0.4 (you know, shipped with the cutting-edge Fedora distribution one year ago, but ancient and no longer to be bothered with by Haskell standards :-) and on 7.6.2. -k Ketil Malde ke...@malde.org writes: Hi, --- I don't think FlexibleInstances works with this GHC, I get: % cabal install --prefix=$G stringable Resolving dependencies... Configuring stringable-0.1.1... Building stringable-0.1.1... Preprocessing library stringable-0.1.1... [1 of 1] Compiling Data.Stringable ( Data/Stringable.hs, dist/build/Data/Stringable.o ) Data/Stringable.hs:54:10: Illegal instance declaration for `Stringable String' (All instance types must be of the form (T t1 ... tn) where T is not a synonym. Use -XTypeSynonymInstances if you want to disable this.) In the instance declaration for `Stringable String' --- I changed the first line of Data/Stringable.hs to: {-# LANGUAGE FlexibleInstances, TypeSynonymInstances #-} and then it compiled. Is there any reason not to retain the TSI pragma? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] GHC and backwards compatibility
I recently encountered the following problem: $ cabal install Resolving dependencies... Configuring array-0.4.0.1... Building array-0.4.0.1... Preprocessing library array-0.4.0.1... Data/Array/IArray.hs:1:14: Unsupported extension: Trustworthy cabal: Error: some packages failed to install: array-0.4.0.1 failed during the building phase. The exception was: ExitFailure 1 asmeval-0 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. binary-0.7.1.0 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. biocore-0.3.1 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. biofasta-0.0.3 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. biopsl-0.4 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. biosff-0.3.3 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. bytestring-0.10.2.0 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. containers-0.5.2.1 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. deepseq-1.3.0.1 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. hashable-1.2.0.10 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. stringable-0.1.1 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. system-filepath-0.4.7 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. text-0.11.3.1 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. unordered-containers-0.2.3.1 depends on array-0.4.0.1 which failed to install. The installed GHC is 7.0.4, and yes, that's many major versions ago, but then again, it's only two years old, and from what I understand, it is shipped by some conservative Linux distributions. The problems here are that: a) the installation tries to install array, but current array requires the Trustworthy extension, which appeared in 7.2.1. Ideally, packages should try to be backwards compatible, e.g. by using conditional sections. b) the output isn't very helpful in tracking down the cause of this problem, it claims that all these packages depend on array-0.4.0.1, which is a lie. Somewhere, somehow, somethings depends on this (or at least a newer version), but I have no clue how to figure out which, except examining each of these packages and their dependencies manually. It is also possible that array shouldn't be upgraded like this, but then that needs to be made clear to cabal somehow, so that I don't spend ages trying to. Are there any solutions to this? Advice on how to proceed? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] GHC and backwards compatibility
Joe Q headprogrammingc...@gmail.com writes: This is definitely an issue with the array package not setting the right minimum versions. You should email the maintainer. Yes, that would be the thing to do, except that the maintainer is librar...@haskell.org, whom I believe does not accept emails from me. :-( But if you (or anybody else) subscribes to the list, perhaps you could forward? In any case, one of the dependencies uses Stringable, which means that a newer GHC is probably still required. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] ordNub
Francesco Mazzoli f...@mazzo.li writes: import qualified Data.HashSet as S nub :: Hashable a = [a] - [a] nub = S.toList . S.fromList Well, the above is not stable while Niklas’ is. But I guess that’s not the point of your message :). We could also implement Data.BloomFilter.nub, which removes equal elements probabilistically (with a small but non-zero chance of removing some unique elements) :-) -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] Possible GSoC project
Hi, I proposed a bioinformatics GSoC project involving Haskell using OSC as the mentoring organization. Typically, haskell.org projects concern infrastructure rather than applications, and I don't know if I'm allowed to submit both places :-) Anyway, as this is a likely place to find prospective students and (co-)mentors, I thought I'd mention it here. But if anybody is interested, I think it makes for a quite focused, solvable problem, which I belive would be quite useful. It could also likely result in a scientific publication of some sort. A quick writeup (that I'll probably update) is here: http://biohaskell.org/Google_Summer_of_Code#optimizing-transalign -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Possible GSoC project
Mateusz Kowalczyk fuuze...@fuuzetsu.co.uk wrote: What would you say is the level of bioinformatics understanding that one would have to have to even consider applying? Not very much, some knowledge of string edit distance and dynamic programming would be good, but if not, it's something I can straighten out with a student in an afternoon, I think. -k -- De profundis ad te clamo. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Lazy object deserialization
Scott Lawrence byt...@gmail.com writes: All the object serialization/deserialization libraries I could find (pretty much just binary and cereal) seem to be strict with respect to the actual data being serialized. Binary became strict between 0.4.4 and 0.5, I think doing so improved the speed of GHC. I had a file format wrapper at the time which depended on it being lazy, and was stuck at 0.4.4 for a long time, until somebody helped me with a workaround. Performance is a bit worse than it was with 0.4.4, but I think it's better to stay with current code. The code in question is in the darcs repository at: http://malde.org/~ketil/biohaskell/biosff the relevant patch is named Update to use [...] -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Ticking time bomb
Ertugrul Söylemez e...@ertes.de writes: People are using Hackage! +1. And I keep telling people to use it. Sure, it'd be better if they used .debs, .rpms, or whatever goes on Mac and Windows. But that would mean I would need to build those packages, including maintaining systems with the respective OSes. I haven't even managed to do it for the systems I do use. The most simple and obvious threat is here that some random evil person gets a Hackage account, uploads a new version of a common package with a trojan, and waits for unsuspecting users to download and install it. My proposal is: 1. Build the necessary machinery into Cabal to allow signing [...] *MY* proposal is that: 0. Hackage sends an email to the previous uploader whenever a new version of a package is uploaded by somebody else. At least that way, I would be notified if it happened to my packages, and I would be able to check up on the situation, and rectify it. This is not to say that cryptographic signing is the wrong thing to do, but a very simple thing like this, which would probably take all of five minutes to implement, would reduce risk by a substantial amount. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Ticking time bomb
Vincent Hanquez t...@snarc.org writes: On 01/31/2013 08:16 AM, Ketil Malde wrote: At least that way, I would be notified if it happened to my packages, and I would be able to check up on the situation, and rectify it. you wouldn't in real cases, I wouldn't what? Be notified? Rectify it? it just fix the most obvious and simple attack vector. but consider: Ah, those _real_ cases. Fine, let's see what you got. * someone intercepting your upload http stream, and replacing dynamically your package. * someone gaining malicious access to hackage and planting stuff inside packages. * a rogue hackage admin. * a rogue hackage mirror admin. How often do these things happen, I wonder? I guess a bit more rarely than malware taking control of people's computers, which would simply allow people access to upload passwords _and_ signing keys. So much for that perfect security scheme, huh? Anyway: I don't want to sound negative here, so as a constructive proposal, please replace one of my packages on Hackage, making use of one of those techniques. No hurry, I'll wait. We have this discussion every now and then, and in spite of grand schemes of crypto and signing and whatnot, we _still_ have security holes you could drive a truck through. Why not at least do _something_ to fix that, before we return to the more _interesting_ pursuit of the Perfect Security Scheme? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Ticking time bomb
Ertugrul Söylemez e...@ertes.de writes: And that may even be more harmful, because an insecure system with a false sense of security is worse than an insecure system alone. Yes. As is clear to all, the current low level of security means that nobody are _actually_ downloading stuff of Hackage, thank God. Hackage just exists for...well, I forget, but certainly not to distribute software. Right. Sarcasm aside, to some extent, this is true. I used to have a cron job 'cabal install'ing my packages off Hackage to ensure that they would compile with the current offering of their dependencies. But I decided it was way too risky, and don't do it anymore. Let's do it properly. You mean like how it was decisively dealt with when this was discussed in 2008? https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/207 Or maybe more the way it was firmly handled when it was brought up again in 2010? http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-December/087050.html This looks increasingly like that time of year when the problem is pointed out, the crypto geeks get together to construct the Optimal Solution, and then everybody lose interest and move on to greener pastures for a while. Well, I don't think the perfect solution exists, and even if it could be identified, it might not be implemented, and even if were implemented, it might not be used. We've just been incredibly lucky that nothing really bad has happened so far. Let's hope it lasts. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] containers license issue
Mike Meyer m...@mired.org writes: Niklas Larsson metanik...@gmail.com wrote: 2012/12/15 Mike Meyer m...@mired.org: Only if Tanenbaum documented the internal behavior of Linux before it was written. Tannenbaum wrote Minix, the operating system that Linus used (and hacked on) before he did Linux. Minix contained lots of features that was reimplemented in Linux. Ah, Minix isn't documentation. And it has a radically different architecture The point is that Linux read the source code to Minix before implementing similar things - quite likely using the same algorithms, for instance. So if containers is a translation of FXT, then surely Linux is a translation of Minix. That makes a successful lawsuit unlikely The point of the point is that neither of these are translations of literary works, there is no precedence for considering them as such, and that reading somebody's work (whether literary or source code) before writing one's own does not imply that the 'somebody' will hold any rights to the subsequent work. Translations in software is what compilers do, not reimplementing specific algorithms. it'll never go to court, so there isn't an infringement. Wot? -k ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] containers license issue
Mike Meyer m...@mired.org writes: As it's commonly understood, reverse engineering doesn't involve looking at the code. I guess I should make it clear that I don't use it in the strict sense - I would call that clean-room reverse engineering. (I'm not sure which is the most commonly understood meaning, I think Wikipedia supports both interpretations) That's why it's called reverse engineering instead of copying. I mean the process of reimplementing specific functionality from another system, with or without knowledge of implementation details. I would use copying to mean verbatim cut-and-pasting, which is something else. In particular when copyright is concerned, I believe that verbatim copying in many cases will require a license to the original work, but merly examining the original work to make use of algorithms, tricks, and structures from it will not. I suspect there's nothing magical about source code, if I extract a component (algorithm or data structure, say) from a program and use it in my own program, I'm not convinced it matters if I extract it from object code, source code, or documentation - they're all copyrighted works, and could be interpreted as translations of the same work. I could be wrong about that, though. -k ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] containers license issue
Clark Gaebel cgae...@uwaterloo.ca writes: I just did a quick derivation from http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#RoundUpPowerOf2 A copyrighted work, you say? to get the highest bit mask, and did not reference FXT nor the containers implementation. Here is my code: If copyright follows reimplementations of algorithms from other programs (because they are considered translations of that program), then surely it must also follow reimplementation from copyrighted documentation? I think this is wrong, copyright does not cover algorithms, and reverse engineering is not literary translation. The implications of anything else would be draconian, simply documenting a program would be a breach of its copyright, for instance, and Tanenbaum would hold the copyright to Linux. But in a court of law, anything is possible. -k ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] containers license issue
Ketil Malde ke...@malde.org writes: I just did a quick derivation from http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#RoundUpPowerOf2 A copyrighted work, you say? Whoops, public domain, according to itself. Of course, there's no way to tell if the author read similar copyrighted programs, but maybe you'll get off easier from claimin the infringement was not wilful? (BTW, the concept Public Domain isn't recognized in some jurisdictions) -k ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] How to determine correct dependency versions for a library?
Aleksey Khudyakov alexey.sklad...@gmail.com writes: Adding more restrictive constraints does not work, the broken package will be on hackage forever, while adding a new version with relaxed constraints works well. That illustrate real problem It's not possible to specify correct version constraints when package is uploaded. So one have to choose between optimistic and conservative approach. Both have disadvantages. In ideal world one need ability to adjust version bounds after package upload. +1. Metadata (i.e. the cabal file) chould be editable. In addition to adjusting dependency bounds, Hackage (or third party build servers) could add Tested-With, and there could be a deprecated field added when problems are discovered. -k ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Hard drive thrashing with modern controllers
timothyho...@seznam.cz writes: import Control.Monad foo = do forever $ writeFile filename.foo Hello world! I could be wrong, but I suspect this is unlikely to result in (hardly) any disk operations at all, as long as there is _any_ write caching in the system. will that destroy those sectors of my SSD after the rated 3000 write cycles? The SSD firmware will even this out by shuffling around the exact flash blocks that are used, so that's 3K write cycles for each block, spread out over hundreds of thousands of blocks - so your SSD should survive perhaps a billion writes in total. The reason I ask, is that I have a program here where I would like to save a set of files after every change/operation and I'm wondering if I should check if the files I'm saving have actually changed or if this will be handled by the OS... Unless the loss of a file would be crucial, I wouldn't worry about it. If/when you wear out the SSD, a replacement will probably be a trivial cost. -k ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Does anyone know where George Pollard is?
Myles C. Maxfield myles.maxfi...@gmail.com writes: Does anyone know where he is? On GitHub? https://github.com/Porges One of the repos was apparently updated less than a week ago. If not, is there an accepted practice to resolve this situation? Should I upload my own 'idna2' package? You can always upload a fork, but unless you have a lot of new functionality that won't fit naturally in the old package, you can perhaps try a bit more to contact the original author. -k ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Over general types are too easy to make.
timothyho...@seznam.cz writes: case largeMultiConstructorTypedValue of Foo{blah=blah,brg=brg} - Some large block... Bar{lolz=lolz,foofoo=foofoo} - ...Another large block... Frog{legs=legs,heads=heads} - Yet another large block... Where the obvious re-factor is: case largeMultiConstructorTypedValue of foo@Foo - processFoo foo bar@Bar - processBar bar frog@Frog - processFrog frog Hm - is that really so obvious? To me, it seems like the definition of processFoo will typically be: processFoo (Foo blah brg) = ... deconstructing the Foo again. If the Foo is very big, this might be a good solution, but in many cases, I expect you can do: case largeMultiConstructorTypedValue of Foo {blah=blah,brg=brg} - processBlahBrg blah brg and this would make the type more specific. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Platform Versioning Policy: upper bounds are not our friends
Bryan O'Sullivan b...@serpentine.com writes: I propose that the sense of the recommendation around upper bounds in the PVP be reversed: upper bounds should be specified *only when there is a known problem with a new version* of a depended-upon package. Another advantage to this is that it's not always clear what constitutes an API change. I had to put an upper bound on binary, since 0.5 introduced laziness changes that broke my program. (I later got some help to implement a workaround, but binary-0.4.4 is still substantially faster). Understandably, the authors didn't see this as a breaking API change. So, +1. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Fixity declaration extension
AntC anthony_clay...@clear.net.nz writes: I agree. I don't declare operators very often, and when I do I always struggle to remember which way round the precedence numbers go. [...] (Anything else we can bikeshed about while we're at it?) infixl * before + Perhaps before and after clearer than higher and lower? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] mutable arrays of tuples
David Feuer david.fe...@gmail.com writes: So I was thinking about a mutable array of tuples, but to avoid allocating tuples to modify their fields, I guess I really want an immutable array of tuples of STRefs. Just how much less efficient is this than a plain mutable array? might it even make sense to use parallel mutable arrays? The thought of that is disgusting to me, but at least one of the arrays could likely be made unboxed... Maybe you could use a tuple of (unboxed) arrays instead? Or if you use Vector instead of Array, I think tuples are member of Unbox (as long as the tuple elements are), and can be used directly in unboxed vectors. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Knight Capital debacle and software correctness
Vasili I. Galchin vigalc...@gmail.com writes: I am going to make an assumption except for Jane Street Capital all/most Wall Street software is written in an imperative language. Tsuru Captial and Standard Chartered are also known to hire functional programmers. Assuming this why is Wall Street not awaken to the dangers. As an explanation, this is a bit simplistic, I think. But I think the reason these companies are willing to use experimental technology (as Haskell is considered to be in industry), is that the consequences of error can be so high. For most mainstream software, users have been trained to accept unreliability, and/or are not willing to pay the costs. Other examples of expensive software faults is the Ariane 5 launch and the Sleipner A oil rig (that collapsed and sunk when in tow due to a mistake in FEA strength calculations). The space (and defense) industry have a long history of working towards software security, but I think they have focused more on the software process than on technology - ADA notwithstanding. And probably rightly so, even though technology can help you write correct code, there is still plenty of rope. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] ghci session slows down over time.
Jonathan Geddes geddes.jonat...@gmail.com writes: Is this a known issue? More importantly, is there a known workaround? My experience is that ghci (typically run as an inferior Emacs process) often retains a lot of memory. Thus, I occasionally kill and restart it. (Not sure if that counts as a workaround :-) -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Install a script with Cabal?
Rogan Creswick cresw...@gmail.com writes: I have a small project that installs a couple of Haskell tools and a script that uses these. Cabal will of course build and install the Haskell programs, but how can I get Cabal to install the script as well? There's a host of UserHooks available¹, but it'd probably be better to have an example than to try to experiment with the right configuration. I don't have an example handy, but I think you'll want preInts, instHook, or postInst. I'd probably go with postInst unless you need data provided by instHook's type that isn't passed to preInst or postInst. I found an example¹ using copyHook. However, this seems to be the wrong thing, at least I am unable to get cabal to ever call this hook (or preCopy, etc). LocalBuildInfo /probably/ has the details you need (eg: installDirTemplates). I just printed out the contents of LocalBuildInfo, but that's 33 pages (I counted) of output. Redirected to a file, it makes it easier to search to find the relevant needles in this haystack. Okay, looking at installDirTemplates, I see `bindir` can extract this data member. It's of course an InstallDirTemplate, not a FilePath, but I found 'fromPathTemplate', which has the right type. Except it only dumps the template, with $prefix and all. Hoogle doesn't seem to know about any of the Cabal stuff, Hayoo has a *very* annoying behavior where it cleans out everything you did if you use the back button, and the source links it advertises seem to point into the wide blue 404. But using the latter, I managed to find a link to 'substPathTemplate', worked out that the PackageIdentifier it needs is a member of PackageDescription, and tried to use that. Except it gives the same result, and doesn't appear to substitute anything. I guess the fact that it is undocumented is a hint that it's the wrong thing to use. Reading some more, maybe 'absoluteInstallDirs' is what I'm looking for? In addition to the usual heap of huge config structs, it needs a CopyDest, though. Since I have no idea what to use, I just put NoCopyDest there. Does that make sense? Okay, it works now, in the sense that I ran it once on my laptop, and it copied the file to ~/.cabal/bin. Here is the code, comments welcome: #!/usr/bin/env runhaskell import Distribution.Simple (defaultMainWithHooks, simpleUserHooks,UserHooks(..)) import Distribution.Simple.Setup (InstallFlags,CopyDest(..)) import Distribution.Simple.Utils (rawSystemExit) import Distribution.PackageDescription (PackageDescription()) import Distribution.Simple.LocalBuildInfo (LocalBuildInfo(..), InstallDirs(..), absoluteInstallDirs) import Distribution.Verbosity (normal) main :: IO () main = defaultMainWithHooks simpleUserHooks { instHook = \pd lbi uh ifs - myinst pd lbi uh ifs instHook simpleUserHooks pd lbi uh ifs } myinst :: PackageDescription - LocalBuildInfo - UserHooks - InstallFlags - IO () myinst pd lbi _uh _fs = do let bin = bindir $ absoluteInstallDirs pd lbi NoCopyDest rawSystemExit normal cp [asmeval, bin] PS: This was a rather frustrating excercise, and after wallowing through a wilderness of modules, types, records and functions, I can't help but feel that Cabal is a bit overengineered. Surely including a script or similar in a package isn't all that outlandish? Could there conceivably have been a simpler way? Or at least, better documented? I suspect the fact that - with the sole exception of the link below -- I could find *no* examples to help me out indicates that it is a bit too complicated. -k ¹ http://blog.ezyang.com/2010/06/setting-up-cabal-the-ffi-and-c2hs/ -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Need inputs for a Haskell awareness presentation
C K Kashyap ckkash...@gmail.com writes: c) Where's my inheritance? I was of the impression that OO has crawled our way, for instance frowing upon (implementation) inheritance and mutable data structures. Maybe you could find appropriate references? Lots of language development these days seems to be looking to functional languages for inspiration. e) Static types - in this day and age - come on - productivity in X is so much more - and that's because they got rid of type mess. Don't mention static types until later - show code without annotations. Then later explain that things are statically typed even without annotations, and that static types helps correctness, e.g. when refactoring code, or building complex compositions of higher order functions. Could you reasonalby do arrows or monads etc. in a dynamically typed language? Moreover, I don't think STM is going to work without types separating TVars from other data, and this shows our types are more powerful than your grandfather's C-style type systems. g) Oh FP, as in Lisp, oh, that's AI stuff right ... we don't really do AI. ...and Java, that's imperative...like Fortran, isn't it? Nah, we don't calculate artillery tables, so... Btw, maybe there could be a wiki section or something with stuff like this - I think it would be useful to collect introductory resources for settings like this - I know I'm often being asked about this Haskell stuff from colleagues and friends. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Most Important GHC extensions to learn/use?
wren ng thornton w...@freegeek.org writes: There are a bunch which are mostly just syntax changes. The important ones are: Also, if you have new GHC, it will often tell you if/when you need to enable extensions. E.g.: Line 8: 1 error(s), 0 warning(s) `Pos' has no constructors (-XEmptyDataDecls permits this) In the data type declaration for `Pos' -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] A functional programming solution for Mr and Mrs Hollingberry
Andreas Pauley apau...@gmail.com writes: Do you know of an exercise where classes would add value? Something fairly small, roughly similar in size to this exercise. AFAICR, the motivating example for OO (in Simula) was simulating an environment where different entities interact - I think the case was queues in a post office, where object represents the door, customers, tellers, etc. Perhaps something along those lines? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Parallel cooperative multithreading?
Benjamin Ylvisaker benjam...@fastmail.fm writes: The paper discusses implementations in Lua, C++ and C, but I think Haskell could be an awesome substrate for such a framework. Has anyone thought about this? I'm not convinced this will be better than using STM - the critique against STM seems (as always) not to apply to implementations where transactional data are segregated by the type system. I'm not sure about the non-composability of retry and orElse that the authors refer to, anybody know? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] darcs patch dependencies in dot format
Sönke Hahn sh...@cs.tu-berlin.de writes: On 05/13/2012 03:13 AM, Felipe Almeida Lessa wrote: Truly amazing! Yes, nice work! I wonder it would fare with larger repositories. =) It does not scale well. [...] Somehow related questions are: What am I going to do with a dot-graph, that has more than 500 vertices? Is there an intelligent way to reduce the graph? Lacking a solution for the problem of drawing large graphs, making the graph smaller might be the second choice. :-) One option might be to only track dependencies back to a specified tag? Or between tags? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Printing call site for partial functions
Michael Snoyman mich...@snoyman.com writes: I had a bug in a site of mine[1] for a few weeks, where it would just print: Prelude.head: empty list It took a long time to track down the problem +1: I've been arguing this for something like ten years :-) One half-baked quasi-solution is to use: #define head (\xs - case xs of { (x:_) - x ; _ - error(head: empty list at++__FILE__++show __LINE__)}) Downsides are that it depends on CPP, and, CPP being a C preprocessor, it doesn't blend well with lines with single apostrophes on them (e.g.: head x') -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] static linking with ghc?
Johannes Waldmann waldm...@imn.htwk-leipzig.de writes: A similar thing is mentioned here (see Caveat) http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Web/Literature/Static_linking Another caveat is that shared linking isn't very useful on Linux, since the C library loads various stuff dynamically anyway. It'd be great to be able to link to a different C library (maybe something from the BSDs?). -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] blog software in Haskell?
Reviving an old thread, since I owe some answers: Jason Dagit dag...@gmail.com writes: If you find a cool solution, let us know. I ended up with hakyll, but haven't had a lot of time to work on this. Here are some small tweaks, though -- partly framed as a response to Twan van Laarhoven's recent post: http://blog.malde.org/posts/hakyll-mods.html -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] adding the elements of two lists
Richard O'Keefe o...@cs.otago.ac.nz writes: newtype PS a = PS [a] deriving (Eq, Show) u f (PS x)= PS $ map f x b f (PS x) (PS y) = PS $ zipWith f x y to_ps x = PS (x : repeat 0) BTW, isn't this a good candidate for an Applicative instance (similar to ZipList)? u f p = f $ p -- or u = fmap b f p1 p2 = f $ p1 * p2 Not a big deal for the Num instance, perhaps, but more general than u and b, and it might make it easier to work with in other ways. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] a code that cannot compile with or without NoMonomorphismRestriction
Ting Lei tin...@hotmail.com writes: (f1, f2) = let commond_definitions = undefined in let f1 = id.show f2 x = ( x) in (f1, f2) I think the type signatures should be: f1 :: Show a = a - String and f2 :: Ord b = b - b - Bool When I define these separately, this works: f1 :: Show a = a - String f1 = id . show f2 :: Ord b = b - b - Bool f2 = flip () But when I define them as a pair f1 :: Show a = a - String f2 :: Ord b = b - b - Bool (f1,f2) = (id . show, flip ()) I get an error message: Line 9: 1 error(s), 0 warning(s) Couldn't match expected type `forall a. Show a = a - String' with actual type `a - String' When checking that `f1' has the specified type `forall a1. Show a1 = a1 - String' Defining the pair at once works: p :: (Show a, Ord b) = (a - String, b - b - Bool) p = (id . show, flip ()) I guess that didn't help a lot, somebody with deeper GHC-fu than me will have to step in. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Mathematics and Statistics libraries
Tom Doris tomdo...@gmail.com writes: If you're interested in UI work, ideally we'd have something similar to RStudio as an environment, a simple set of windows encapsulating an editor, a repl, a plotting panel and help/history, this sounds superficial but it really has an impact when you're exploring a data set and trying stuff out. I agree, this sounds really nice. I really disagree that we need a data frame type structure; they're an abomination in R, they try to accommodate event records and time series, and do neither well. Just to clarify (since I think the original suggestion was mine), I don't want to copy R's data frame (which I never quite understood, anyway), but I'd like some standardized data structure, ideally with an option to label columns, and functions to slice and join. The underlying structure can just be a list of columns (Vector) or whatever. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] Install a script with Cabal?
Hi, I have a small project that installs a couple of Haskell tools and a script that uses these. Cabal will of course build and install the Haskell programs, but how can I get Cabal to install the script as well? There's a host of UserHooks available¹, but it'd probably be better to have an example than to try to experiment with the right configuration. -k ¹ http://www.haskell.org/cabal/release/cabal-latest/doc/API/Cabal/Distribution-Simple.html#t%3AUserHooks -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Theoretical question: are side effects necessary?
Ryan Ingram ryani.s...@gmail.com writes: You can emulate mutation with at most O(log(n)) penalty using a map. Given that memory is of fixed size, log2(n) = 64, so for real-world programs this becomes O(1). I'm not sure assuming fixed size memory is a good idea for a theoretical discussion - your computer is no longer Turing complete, and one type of implementation will likely be able to fit a different set of programs in the given memory than the oher. Another nit: this is O(log(n)) of working set, not input/problem size. But I guess any algorithm must be at least O(working set size), so it's still a log factor (or less) of the algorithmic complexity. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Empty Input list
Kevin Clees k.cl...@web.de writes: Now my function looks like this: tmp:: [(Int, Int)] - Int - (Int, Int) tmp [] y = (0,0) ^ tmp xs y = xs !! (y-1) If the function returns (0,0) it will blocked by another function. Personally, I think using special values like this is a code smell, and indicates poor design. There are many implicit assumptions, for instance that (0,0) isn't already a member of the input list, and that this is correctly handled by surrounding functions. Generally, it's much more desirable to encode this in the types, so I would vastly prefer the Maybe solution in almost all cases, which makes these assumptions explicit. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Global Arrays
Clark Gaebel cgae...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca writes: In Haskell, what's the canonical way of declaring a top-level array (Data.Vector of a huge list of doubles, in my case)? Performance is key in my case. The straightforward way would just be something like: globalArray :: V.Vector Double globalArray = V.fromList [ huge list of doubles ] {-# NOINLINE globalArray #-} However, I don't want to have to run the fromList at runtime. I think GHC will convert it to an array (and in general evaluate constants) at compile time (probably requires -O). -k ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] If you'd design a Haskell-like language, what would you do different?
Jerzy Karczmarczuk jerzy.karczmarc...@unicaen.fr writes: and the source of it power - if I might cite you - is that we don't see the difference between an object and the process which creates it. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia's article on type system: A type system associates a type with each computed value. but later cites Pierce: a tractable syntactic framework for classifying phrases according to the kinds of values they compute While the former might be said to avoid _|_ by defining it to not be a value that is computed, the latter clearly must include it, as a the computation of a phrase might not terminate (as longs as the language is Turing-complete, of course). Anyway, I think also non-lazy languages has bottom inhabiting their types, it's just that since it leads more immediately to failure, it's not usually taken into account. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] xattr takeover
Deian Stefan haskell-c...@deian.net writes: I've been trying to get in touch with the maintainer (CC'd) about the xattr package for about a month. There are quite a few memory leaks (among other issues) for which I have a patch (see [1]). I would like to push the new version to Hackage, but the etiquette for taking over a package is unclear. Any suggestions? If you've made a decent effort, I think you should just upload it with the fix (and again CC the previous author). Nobody benefits from having buggy software out there. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Cabal-1.10.1.0 and bytestring-0.9.2.1 hackage problem.
Alan Pogrebinschi alan...@gmail.com writes: That Cabal-1.10.1.0 bug seems to be back, now with bytestring-0.9.2.1 just uploaded to hackage. Thanks for the link! I was banging my head on against the virtual wall, since all I'm getting is: % cabal install -v biopsl Reading available packages... Resolving dependencies... cabal: Couldn't read cabal file bytestring/0.9.2.1/bytestring.cabal It's not exactly obvious what this error message means. Same workaround as last time works I.e: tar -f ~/.cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org/00-index.tar --delete bytestring/0.9.2.1 This is the cabal-install shipped with Ubuntu 12.04 (i.e. the unreleased beta, which will become the new LTS in April), so buggy or not, it ought not to be broken if we can avoid it. I've filed a bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/haskell-cabal-install/+bug/925967 -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Data newtype differences. Today: strictness
Yves Parès yves.pa...@gmail.com writes: I had for long thought that data and newtype were equivalent, but then I spotted some differences when it comes to strictness. data Test = Test Int newtype TestN = TestN Int Interesting. I'd thought that data Test = Test !Int and newtype Test = Test Int would be equivalent, but here you (well, I had to add the ! myself) show a situation where they're not. I guess pm (Test _) = 12 is the same as pm = \x - case x of Test _ - 12 which perhaps makes it clearer why it breaks on undefined... -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] black Wikipedia
John Meacham j...@repetae.net writes: now, you might say we can just move hackage out of the US This might actually make things worse. The President's office is against hurting US industry, and wants it to be mainly used to attack foreign sites. They will not only order takedowns, but use DNS and ICANN to enforce this policy. Not only that, but the proponents are not just hollywood, it is anyone that feels they will have an advantage with the ability to bully internet sites. For instance, monster cable The scientology church. Politicians. Apparently, Bush considered bombing Al Jazeera, you can imagine how long it would take before it got blocked for copyright violations. The problem is bigger than just free speech (as if that isn't big enough) - it's yet another presumed guilty, preemptive strike law. Patents are similar, even if you do nothing wrong, heavyweights (e.g. Google) can extort smaller players (e.g. me) by simply threatening to sue. Even if they have no chance to win, I simply cannot afford to play, so I have no option except to comply with their demands. SOPA is just the latest and most blatant in the series, trying to secure the entertainment industry the same power over the Internet. That the American Congress is working so hard to place this kind of power in the hands of a relatively small industry -- well, we can all draw our own conclusions. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] STM atomic blocks in IO functions
Bryan O'Sullivan b...@serpentine.com writes: The question is a simple one. Must all operations on a TVar happen within *the same* atomically block, or am I am I guaranteed thread safety if, say, I have a number of atomically blocks in an IO function. If you want successive operations to see a consistent state, they must occur in the same atomically block. I'm not sure I understand the question, nor the answer? I thought the idea was that state should be consistent on the entry and exit of each atomically block. So you can break your program into multiple transactions, but each transaction should be a semantically complete unit. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] On the purity of Haskell
Chris Smith cdsm...@gmail.com writes: I wonder: can writing to memory be called a “computational effect”? If yes, then every computation is impure. I wonder if not the important bit is that pure computations are unaffected by other computations (and not whether they can affect other computations). Many pure computations have side effects (increases temperature, modifies hardware registers and memory, etc), but their effect can only be observed in IO. (E.g. Debug.Trace.trace provides a non-IO interface by use of unsafePerformIO which is often considered cheating, but in this view it really is pure.) -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] What happens if you get hit by a bus?
Michael Litchard mich...@schmong.org writes: One article addresses the question above. His answer was that he uses RoR which has a large community and he is therefore easily replaceable. My question, for freelancers in general, and web developers in particular is this: How do you address this question? In this particular case, you could argue that more people know PHP and Python than Ruby, so surely one should avoid Ruby as well. Managers like to think of their company as a factory, and from this perspective, it makes sense to build your factory from easily obtainable parts. But the factory mindset only works when you want to manufacture stuff, nobody who takes a minute to actually think will say that you can replace any programmer with any other, as long as they know the same programming language or framework. Anyway, here's something I found interesting in that respect: http://www.dachisgroup.com/2011/12/cant-get-no-satisfaction-why-service-companies-cant-keep-their-promises/ (This probably turned out less helpful than I intended, sorry :-) -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Sharing on equality
Johan Brinch brin...@gmail.com writes: Can GHC eliminate one of two equal ByteStrings, when they are compared and turns out to be equal? Not in general, there is no guarantee that a is identical to b, just because a == b. Say i have a map, ByteString - Int. Data.Map.Map ByteString Int I now do a lookup on a ByteString and if it exists, I insert this ByteString into a list. Is it possible to avoid using more memory, than used by the keys in the map + the list structure? I guess, this could be done by having lookup return the key as well, and then insert this key into the list, however, that's a bit ugly and somewhat anti-intuitive. I think this /is/ intuitive. (Or you could replace the key in the map, but that will still leave duplicates in the list). -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] How did iteratees get their names?
Henrik Nilsson n...@cs.nott.ac.uk writes: Just like chatter and chattee, employer and employee, there is an iterator (usually as part of an enumerator/ee) and an iteratee. Thanks for the attempt to explain. But I, at least, remain mystified, and I agree with Douglas that the terminology is confusing. FWIW, I always thought it was a kind of pun on the iterators in OO-land. There, the iterator is a cursor-like object, and the program controls it to iterate over the input -- typically a collection or similar. Iteratees invert this, the program is in the form of an iteratee, and it is being iterated by the input (enumerator). So the iterator is actively controlling a passive (or reactive) input, while the iteratee is reactively processing an active or controlling input. Or something, I'm hardly an authority on this. I hope it makes sense. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Poll: Do you want a mascot? -- please stop this
David Virebayre dav.vire+hask...@gmail.com writes: Also, this is café, right ? Aren't people subscribed to this list supposed to expect a broad range of topics ? I don't mind a broad range of topics, but using it to collect polls is IMHO abusing it. I guess I can dust off the killfiling features in Gnus to deal with this, but I still think it's very annoying. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] A Mascot
serialhex serial...@gmail.com writes: On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 12:22 AM, Jeremy Shaw jer...@n-heptane.com wrote: - honey badger - can't beat that for 'robust' and 'fearless', http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPKlryXwmXk i think you were referring to this vid: Original channel with lots of other animals and similar commentary. Certainly a refreshing alternative to the overly dramatic Discovery/Animal Planet style. And plenty of mascot material there: http://www.youtube.com/czg123 -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [ANN] transformers-base, transformers-abort, monad-abort-fd
Felipe Almeida Lessa felipe.le...@gmail.com writes: It's funny how we, haskellers, find 'm' and 'b' descriptive names. I know many programmers who would cry after seeing this =). It takes a bit of practice to get used to, but then they really are descriptive. The trick is to keep the number of entities - parameters, types, etc low enough to keep mental track. To me, LongAndVeryDescripteNames is a code smell: your code is too complicated. Let them cry, I say! -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] A Mascot
John Meacham j...@repetae.net writes: People tend to concentrate on the lambda which cooresponds to the functional aspect of haskell when designing logos. Not nearly enough attention is paid to the other striking feature, the What about types? This is a distinguishing feature from many of the other lambda-users out there, isn't \lambda_\tau used to signify that? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] blog software in Haskell?
Simon Michael si...@joyful.com writes: Did someone mention hakyll already? Yes, Mihai, but thanks for the link. I'll probably check it out when I'm back from vacation. Alistair: I'm already using gitit, but I think it's usage is a bit different. Jason: I know about the various services, but I prefer to host it myself. Thanks for all the suggestions, I'll let you know how it goes! -k (Shaver of yaks) -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Hackage feature request: E-mail author when a package breaks
Yitzchak Gale g...@sefer.org writes: Gregory Crosswhite wrote: could [Hackage] have a feature where when a working package breaks with a new version of GHC the author is automatically e-mailed? This would be nice. However, there would have to be a way for it to be turned on and off by the author. (Spam is not nice.) This is where it stranded the last time, IIRC. That sentiment makes me a bit uneasy; so you are the official maintainer of a package on Hackage, but you do not want to hear about it when it fails to compile? To me, this raises the question whether you should take on the responsibility as maintainer at all. Ideally, I think Hackage should avoid being a dumping ground for non-working code, and I think the key to high quality software is having active maintainers for each package. If the author of a package is unwilling to accept failure reports, I suggest she could leave the Maintainer field blank, or fill it with a dummy value (e.g. unmaintained). -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Hackage feature request: E-mail author when a package breaks
Max Bolingbroke batterseapo...@hotmail.com writes: This is where it stranded the last time, IIRC. That sentiment makes me a bit uneasy; so you are the official maintainer of a package on Hackage, but you do not want to hear about it when it fails to compile? Don't forget that some packages fail to compile on Hackage even though they work fine, because e.g. they depend on a third-party C library that is not installed, or depend on some other package that Hackage cannot build. True, in that case, it's harder to avoid getting one email every time you upload a new version. We should still strive to have stuff build on Hackage (e.g. installing C libs or fixing the ohter packages); if the build fails for one of these reasons, you never know if it fails for other reasons as well. So, I'd *love* to get an email when my packages fail to build, but I will accept that other people have a more sensitive relationship with their inbox. (I assume that the people who raise this objection - Max and Yitzchak - belong in this category? It's not entirely clear from your comments, and I do hope we're not avoiding useful functionality based on a purely *hypothetical* problem.) Conrad suggested creating a mailing list per package, another option could be to automatically post to a single maintainers list, highlighting the package (and preferably also maintainer) name in the Subject. A decent MUA could then up-score the more relevant messages. I'd really like to see Hackage move to a continuous integration type of system, where everything is automatically built and tests are run on every submission. If somebody works out the software infrastructure, I'll volunteer CPU cycles. Next hackathon? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Hackage feature request: E-mail author when a package breaks
Yitzchak Gale g...@sefer.org writes: I am just a little worried that if uploading to Hackage requires agreeing to unlimited uncontrollable spamming by a bot, The bot would, of course, be implemented in Haskell. Anybody who still worries about bugs, is free to implement a better one in Agda. :-) it may cause some good packages not to be uploaded by people who are hesitant to agree to that. One solution could be to have a Maintainer field contain a name, but no email address? So I could do: Maintainer: Ketil Malde ke...@malde.org -- send email to me or Maintainer: Ketil Malde -- don't send email, Google me if you are -- human and it's that important or even Maintainer: Ketil Malde ketil at malde dot org -- email me if you are human Or of course Maintainer: -- empty field means unmaintained, caveat emptor! Generalizing from my sample of one, I think most people would stick with the first option, but at least this policy would leave things open for those preferring alternatives. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] blog software in Haskell?
Hi, I just upgraded my server, and set up everything again. Except wordpress, as 1) I'm not too fond of its user interface, and 2) it's a big pile of PHP, difficult to keep updated, and basically a disaster waiting to happen (and in fact, it was hacked at one point). Before I enable it again, is there any alternatives I should consider? Preferably written in Haskell, of course, but other suggestions welcome as well. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] STM program
Hi, Café, I'm playing with STM a bit, and did a small writeup. As I'm considering to submit it, uh, tomorrow, I was wondering if anybody would care to take a look? I'm especially nervous about the accuracy and clarity of my descriptions of monads and STM, which are terse and written in a hurry. Anyway: I'd be most grateful for any feedback you care to give. http://malde.org/~ketil/stmcluster.pdf -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Package documentation complaints -- and a suggestion
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com writes: Right, but first we need to define what all those terms _mean_... and it's no good saying your package is stable if you change the API in a large-scale fashion every release. I think there are better criteria to use, like: - do exported definition have Haddock comments? - does the package have an automated test suite? - is the package used by other packages? - ...by different authors? - has the package been recently updated? I'm sure there are other things as well that could be added. If this could be automatically checked, and displayed alongside the package name on Hackage (perhaps as adding one star per checklist item), it would encourage authors to actually improve their packages, rather than just label them stable. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Package documentation complaints -- and a suggestion
Max Rabkin max.rab...@gmail.com writes: This is useful information, but to call it stability is not only misleading, but it also prevents the package from using that field to indicate whether or not it is stable! Oh, right - I'm not much interested in the stability of a package. What I want to know, is which package to choose for some purpose. By highlighting stuff that is correlated with usefulness, I'll be able to make a quicker, more informed decision. Separating this from stability is a feature, not a bug, since it frees the author to label the package stable or not - instead of encouraging using stable to mean please use. :-) -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Efficient mutable arrays in STM
Ben Franksen ben.frank...@online.de writes: An array of TVars is certainly *much* too inefficient for what I have in mind w.r.t. both memory and cpu time. You must be a lot more confident than I if you say this without benchmarking first. :-) IME, there are (at least) two possible problems here, 1) transactions scale (quadratically, I think) with the number of TVars touched, so if any transaction touch a large part of the array, it's going to cost you, and 2) every element of your array will have a pointer to it, making GC potentially expensive. Perhaps you can get around the latter by tuning GC, e.g. +RTS -A100M might help. Or should I use a high-level approach, something like a Data.Sequence.Seq of medium sized chunks (TVar (IOVector e))? I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but if you're going to touch contigous segments of the array, why not TArray (Vector e) or similar? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] ANN: diagrams 0.4
Rustom Mody rustompm...@gmail.com writes: I remember (vaguely) a 'live page' ie where one could enter (into the browser) changes to the diagrams code and see the results immediately. Is that page there? (Or am I mixing up with something else?) Chris Smith's web interface to Ben Lippmeier's Gloss, perhaps? http://dac4.designacourse.com:8000/ -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] hello Haskell
Tom Murphy amin...@gmail.com writes: Blocking/unsubscribing people based on their email provider seems... sort of impolite or unwelcoming. A greylist could work. Greylist, as in temporarily refuse a message, and wait for the sending mail server to retry? I don't see how it would work against hijacked hotmail accounts, they most likely use the real hotmail service - which would retry appropriately. My own experience indicates that spammers now often correctly retry deliveries, so greylisting is less effective than it used to be. Given the relatively low volume of spam, my vote is for the original suggestion of first-message-moderated, with the ability to put an address back on moderation if their account is hacked. +1 -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: vector-bytestring-0.0.0.0
Michael Snoyman mich...@snoyman.com writes: sense to try and pursue something like what you're suggesting, but I think the default Show (Vector Word8) should be the one most useful, most of the time, and I think the general consensus seems to be the current ByteString instance fits that role. Hm. I think it is slightly weird to display a numeric value (Word8) as a Char. Also, I would prefer a representation making the type explicit (but unlike ByteString, vector seems to add a type annotation.) Would you still support the truncating behavior for 'read' and values above 255? (ByteString has two interfaces, ByteString and .Char8, but as there can be only one Show instance, I see why it works the way it does.) -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] The best way to call Java from Haskell?
Jerzy Karczmarczuk jerzy.karczmarc...@unicaen.fr writes: Don't worry, my friend. Haskell is lazy, so there is no problem in handling those infinite modules. It will just take you an infinite amount of time before you get any money from such a work. But this is a general problem elsewhere as well. I guess you must be thinking of Haskell being increasingly used in banks? It must have been some bank manager who, after hiring one too many Haskell programmers, invented a scheme that would generate an infinite amount of money. He didn't realize before it was too late that the actual value of the scheme would be bottom... -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Three questions to graphviz
kaffeepause73 kaffeepaus...@yahoo.de writes: Thanks for the quick reply - it works now. - I wasted quite a bit time on this. Alternatively, you can turn on overloaded strings, which allows constructing text values (along with other types that are instances of IsString) from string constants. Add {-# Language OverloadedStrings #-} at the top of your source file to enable it. I guess the internal bit in the compiler message confused me. It is a common idiom to put internals -- e.g. data type definitions -- in a module called Internal. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] SMP parallelism increasing GC time dramatically
I don't know if this is relevant to your problems, but I'm currently struggling to get some performance out of a parallel - or rather, concurrent - program. Basically, the initial thread parses some data into an IntMap, and then multiple threads access this read-only to do the Real Work. Now, there appears to be a lot of overhead incurred when using multiple threads, and I suspect that this is caused by the map storing unevaluated thunks, which then are forced by accesses by the worker threads. Ideally, the evaluation should be performed in parallel, but perhaps there are issues (of synchronization, say) that makes this less performant? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] ANN: OpenCL 1.0.1.3 package
Luis Cabellos cabel...@ifca.unican.es writes: * The main reason is that I'm not comfortable with the license you're using. The original code by Jeff Heard was BSD3 with an additional copyright notice. Your code is AGPL3. The GPL is known to cause problems with Haskell code due to cross module inlining. I don't know how the A in AGPL changes things. I don't think inlining matters in this case. If you distribute a work incorporating GPL code, you must allow the recipient to redistribute it (including all sources) under the GPL. Clearly, GPL code is not suitable when you wish to redistribute it along with proprietary code, but it should be unproblematic for most open source projects. For *L*GPL code, the intention is that it can apply to a library, distributed as a separate unit, and allowing it to be *used* as such, also by proprietary applications. Inlining through static linking may affect this, as it incorporates actual code from the LGPL library in a program that is then distributed as a propietary, binary object. I understand your point. I didn't know the problems with cross module inlining that Haskell suffers. I learned the BSD3, I think is a good and I'll change it on github and I'll put in the next release. If you are happy with BSD3, that license is the one which will make your code most generally useful. The intent behind the GPL family is to make the code useful to those who reciprocate the sentiment, and less useful to those who don't. In practice, it is rare that BSD3 licensed libraries are made proprietary, it is often to everybody's benefit that thinks are maintained in the open. The general sentiment in the Haskell community is a preference for BSD. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Is it possible to represent such polymorphism?
sdiy...@sjtu.edu.cn writes: This has nothing to do with OOP or being imperative. It's just about types. Of course, it's not necessarily linked to OOP, but OO languages - to the extent they have types - tend towards ad-hoc polymorphism instead of parametric polymorphism. There are different trade-offs, one is the lack of return-type overloading in C++. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Static linking for machines that don't have Haskell
Roshan James rpja...@umail.iu.edu writes: This gives me several warnings of the form: */usr/lib/haskell-packages/ghc6/lib/network-2.2.1.7/ghc-6.12.3/libHSnetwork-2.2.1.7.a(BSD.o): In function `sw4B_info':* *(.text+0x584c): warning: Using 'getservbyport' in statically linked applications requires at runtime the shared libraries from the glibc version used for linking* Yes, the Linux libc doesn't really support static linking, and in fact actively subverts it by dynamically loading other libraries from hardwired paths. I'm sure there's a good reason for it. Some things can be worked around by setting environment variables etc, but generally, try to compile on the oldest system you can find (since backwards compatibility is better supported than forward), and use the same distribution. Use strace to see what dynamic libraries your executable tries to load, and Google to see what can be done about them. The best solution would be to use a different libc. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] mapM is supralinear?
Here's my feeble understanding of GC: 1. GC runs when after some specified amount of allocations 2. GC runs in time proportional to the live heap, which it needs to traverse. This means that for a long running mapM, like any other computation generating a long list, (1) GC will run a number of times proportional to the length of the list, and (2) each run will have a cost proportional to the length of the list. I.e. a linear algorithm is now quadratic. A lazy mapM (or mapM_), consuming the list as fast as it is generated, will of course keep the list short/heap small, and thus the cost of each GC is constant (for some value of constant). I suppose generational GC will help in practice, since the young generation gets to start near the end of the list, but it will still be linear in generated length, and you still need major GCs too, occasionally. Also, I guess mapM is more vulnerable to this, since the operations (IO, say) involved in building the list likely do short-lived allocations, triggering more GCs than simpler, pure computations would. Do let me know if this is probably a terribly naive view. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] instance Enum Double considered notentirelygreat?
Iavor Diatchki iavor.diatc...@gmail.com writes: last ([0.1, 0.2 .. 0.5]) == 0.5 False last (map fromRational [0.1, 0.2 .. 0.5]) == 0.5 True As Ross pointed out in a previous e-mail the instance for Rationals is also broken: last (map fromRational [1,3 .. 20]) 21.0 But only because it tries to mimic the behavior of Float/Double, I think. Rational could easily have produced 19 here. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] instance Enum Double considered not entirely great?
Daniel Fischer daniel.is.fisc...@googlemail.com writes: Btw, -0.0 can be problematic too. How so? As far as I can tell Ord and Eq treat it as equal to 0.0 in every way, Yes. Which can be inconvenient if you are interested in whether you got a -0.0, so if that's the case, you can't simply use (== -0.0). For instance, somebody might have the idea to store floating point values in a HashSet, which might (or might not) produce a different result from the regular Set in this case. Conversely, you might get different values out of the set than the ones you put into it, which could be surprising. IMO, it's definitely a good practice to avoid otherwise distinguishable values comparing as equal. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] stack overflow pain
Tim Docker t...@dockerz.net writes: mapM_ applyAction sas Maybe you could try a lazy version of mapM? E.g., I think this would do it: import System.IO.Unsafe (unsafeInterleaveIO) : mapM' f = sequence' . map f where sequence' ms = foldr k (return []) ms k m m' = do { x - m; xs - unsafeInterleaveIO m'; return (x:xs) } -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] instance Enum Double considered not entirely great?
Chris Smith cdsm...@gmail.com writes: It would be a shame if we lost an occasionally useful and easy to read You forgot confusing? Expecting Enum to enumerate all inhabitants of a type seems very reasonable to me, and seems to hold for all non-floating point types. A numeric range [a..a+n] might be expected to have a+n+1 elements, but that doesn't hold either for Float and Double. I think Enum for floating point values is broken - but it is reality, so we need to deal with it. Instead, perhaps the issue should be brought up with the fixed-point number library you're using, and they could fix their Enum instance to be more helpful. Or just avoid Enum, and define range or something similar instead. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] The applicative instances for Either?
Daniel Fischer daniel.is.fisc...@googlemail.com writes: Is there any information, or otherwise accessible source specifying exactly when this was changed, Checking the sources, it wasn't in base-4.2.0.2 (ghc-6.12.3), but it was in base-4.3.1.0 (ghc-7.0.2), so it was introduced with base-4.3 Thanks to you, and everybody else who replied. Now, it turns out, both me (who get this instance from imports) and my user (who doesn't) are using base-4.2.0.2, so it has to be elsewhere. The duplicate instance reports Control.Monad.Trans.Error - hackage insists this is part of transformers, which I don't use, but maybe mtl imports and reexports the instances? Apparently this is the case, I tried to ghc-pkg hide mtl-2, and then I could load a file declaring an instance for Error e = Applicative (Either e) using mtl-1. So it appears I should require mtl = 2 (and possibly base = 4.3 as an alternative, but I guess mtl-2 is not too draconian). (This case was a bit opaque for me, I'm not sure how it could be made easier to trace down conflicts like this, perhaps I just don't know the right tools.) -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] The applicative instances for Either?
Hi, I have a program that makes use of the applicative instance for Either String. I used to define these instances locally, but at some point, they became part of Control.Applicative. I have limited the dependencies to 'base = 4', but apparently, some version 4s of base include this instance, some do not, and it causes problems for people trying to compile the program. Is there any information, or otherwise accessible source specifying exactly when this was changed, so that I can have more precise dependencies? And is there a simple way to handle this conditionally, either within cabal, or using CPP? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Data structure
yrazes yra...@gmail.com writes: I want to compare data structure between Haskell, Java, Lisp and C. I am wondering if I could compare list comprehention in haskell with the vector class in Java, macros in common lisp and dynamic arrays in C. You /can/ compare them, of course, but they are very different concepts. I'd classify list comprehensions and macros as control structures, rather than data structures, for instance. Wouldn't it be more appropriate to compare Haskell's algebraic data types with C structs, Java classes, and Lisp S-expressions? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] ping haskell.org timeout
Jason Dagit dag...@gmail.com writes: Lots of servers turn off ICMP packet responses these days Because users don't really need error messages, that's privileged information for system administrators. Besides, if someone is trying to debug http protocol issues using ICMP, they're taking an awfully indirect route. Yes, first thing would be to check the log files. Oh, wait, users don't have read permissions for those... I think the reason it gets disabled is typically well intentioned. And we all know where that road leads - to frustration and low quality services, that's where. Sorry for my grumpiness - this is a constant struggle for me. :-) It takes a while to complete with no visual feedback. Perhaps the network is just slow? Or perhaps the web pages are cached somewhere along the way? All of those are plausible [..] Perhaps 'cabal update' should provide some visual feedback by default? There's -v, but there's still a noticable pause (15 seconds on a fairly beefy computer and a good connection) between Downloaded to [..] and Reading available packages The index is 3MB, it's probably not big enough that a smarter protocol (rsync/rdiff?) would improve things? Except perhaps checking that it has been updated since the last update - that'd probably save a ton of bandwidth if/when people do automatic updates. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] ping haskell.org timeout
Jason Dagit dag...@gmail.com writes: On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 2:39 PM, Greg Fitzgerald gari...@gmail.com wrote: cabal update hangs. ping haskell.org times out. But haskell.org and hackage webpages are loading just fine. What's going on? Lots of servers turn off ICMP packet responses these days Because users don't really need error messages, that's privileged information for system administrators. so ping isn't as reliable as it once was for detecting when a server is running. Looks like haskell.org isn't one of them. CON:~ % ping haskell.org PING haskell.org (78.46.100.180) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from lambda.haskell.org (78.46.100.180): icmp_req=1 ttl=48 time=53.8 ms 64 bytes from lambda.haskell.org (78.46.100.180): icmp_req=2 ttl=48 time=52.4 ms 64 bytes from lambda.haskell.org (78.46.100.180): icmp_req=3 ttl=48 time=52.5 ms ^C --- haskell.org ping statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2000ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 52.451/52.935/53.804/0.670 ms I'm not sure why cabal update would hang. It takes a while to complete with no visual feedback. Perhaps the network is just slow? Or perhaps the web pages are cached somewhere along the way? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Invitation to connect on LinkedIn
Andrew Smith B.Sc(Hons),MBA asmith9...@gmail.com writes: I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. Since LinkedIn tends to spam even more ambitiously than the other social network sites, I have a procmail rule sending any mail from Linkedin to /dev/null. But it doesn't work when it's sent via other mailing lists, when some person of dubious faculty and questionable morals wants to add an entire list to his professional network... -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] partial inheritance
Patrick Browne patrick.bro...@dit.ie writes: Is it possible to model partial inheritance using Haskell type classes? For example, if the class Bird has a flying method can we represent Penguins as a sub-class of Bird without a flying method? I'm not sure the question makes sense, if fly is a method of class Bird, then it can't also be a member of class Penguin. You can of course make instances of Bird without implementing the fly method (whether they are also instances of Penguin or not), or by implementing it as undefined. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] NLP libraries and tools?
Perhaps this is interesting? On the relationship between exploratory (a.k.a. sloppy or theoretical) and rigorous math. http://arxiv.org/pdf/math/9307227v1 -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Call for GUI examples - Functional Reactive Programming
[snip haskell@, leaving -café] Heinrich Apfelmus apfel...@quantentunnel.de writes: Do you know any *small GUI programs* that you would *like* to see *implemented with Functional Reactive Programming?* I don't know if this fits the bill, but a tool that I'd like to see is plotting for one or more live streams of data. I guess I want something similar to timeplot, but listening on an input stream and updating/scrolling the plot. Think 'tail -f /var/log/messages | awk something | liveplot options'. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Diagnose stack space overflow
Max Bolingbroke batterseapo...@hotmail.com writes: Stack space overflow: current size 8388608 bytes. Use `+RTS -Ksize -RTS' to increase it. I want to find out the culprit function and rewrite it tail-recursively. Is there a way to find out which function is causing this error other than reviewing the code manually? It's possible that building your program with profiling and then running with +RTS -xc will print a useful call stack. Does this help, really? I've tried that occasionally, but can't really say it's ever helped pinpoint the problem. (Not complaining, stack traces are hard in Haskell.) I generally heap-profile (often with the -hd option), most stack overflows will also retain heap data (i.e. a stack of (+) operations will point to all the numbers as well), which should give you an idea of where to look. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Diagnose stack space overflow
John Lato jwl...@gmail.com writes: I want to find out the culprit function and rewrite it tail-recursively. Is there a way to find out which function is causing this error other than reviewing the code manually? I'd like to point out that a stack-space overflow in Haskell isn't quite the same thing as in other functional languages. In particular, it's possible for tail-recursive functions to overflow the stack because of laziness. ..in fact, you often want to *avoid* tail recursion (e.g. as implemented in foldl) and use something that is not tail recursive (e.g. foldr) but more laziness-friendly. Or use strictness (foldl'). -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Patterns for processing large but finite streams
Eugene Kirpichov ekirpic...@gmail.com writes: 2011/7/1 Heinrich Apfelmus apfel...@quantentunnel.de: Eugene Kirpichov wrote: I'm rewriting timeplot to avoid holding the whole input in memory, and naturally a problem arises: Plain old lazy lists? Heretic! :-) I generally have written a bunch of programs that do things that way, and I think it works pretty well with a couple of caveats: 1. Make sure you collect data into strict data structures. Dangerous operations are addition and anything involving Data.Map. And use foldl'. 2. If you plan on working on multiple files, extra care might be needed to close them, or you'll run out of file descriptors. As long as you avoid these pitfalls, the advantage is very clean and simple code. Plain old lazy lists do not allow me to combine multiple concurrent computations, e.g. I cannot define average from sum and length. Yes, this is clunky. I'm not aware of any good solution. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Best platform for development with GHC?
Dmitri O.Kondratiev doko...@gmail.com writes: Let me know if you would like opinions on Emacs vs vi! I know vi, but it is just that I got used to Emacs which is my main IDE for most PL that I work with and for many years already ) No, no! Stop, it was just a joke, really. I regret it already. :-) -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Best platform for development with GHC?
John D. Ramsdell ramsde...@gmail.com writes: Developers should be using older versions of GHC because they cannot be sure users will have an up-to-date GHC. I wonder, how hard would it be to have, say Amazon images of various Linux distributions with ghc and cabal-install available? Currently, I have a discontious integration server that checks my stuff by pulling off hackage, but this is a bit limited, as well as a security risk. I'd consider running something off Amazon instead - perhaps it could even be automated, so that I could do 'cabal install whatever' in parallel on a slew of configurations? And, although I could probably pay for my own stuff, perhaps Amazon could contribute (som of) the CPU time? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Best platform for development with GHC?
Dmitri O.Kondratiev doko...@gmail.com writes: Which platform - Mac OS X, Linux or Win32 is best for development with GHC today? I think most developers use Linux, which tends to ensure that more stuff will work there. Most developers will also tend to use recent versions of everything, so go with Fedora or Ubuntu or Debian testing, rather than Debian stable or RHEL. In general, Haskell seems to be quite portable (in contrast to Java, say), and difficulties seem to be mostly around stuff that requires interaction with specific C libraries. How are things with Ubuntu? I use Ubuntu. Most stuff is fairly up-to-date, but even with six-month releases, it's lagging the cutting edge, and GHC is still 6.12. Thus, I tend to install development stuff via Cabal these days, which at least partly evens out the playing ground between different distributions. In general, I like Ubuntu for adding a regular schedule to Debian, and making recommended choices (e.g., which SMTP server to choose?). I also like the expermients with the user interface, although I don't use them myself (xmonad is still less obstrusive and much smaller and faster :-) Downsides is the huge bug database, where bugs seldom seem to be dealt with. (Also, I'm constantly annoyed at all the nice bits that are missing from our RHEL/CentOS servers.) An alternative for me might be Debian testing. I don't want to start religious wars, I tried to be non-flammable. Let me know if you would like opinions on Emacs vs vi! -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Data.List / Map: simple serialization?
Dmitri O.Kondratiev doko...@gmail.com writes: xss2 - read `fmap` readFile output.txt Two questions: 1) Why to use 'fmap' at all if a complete file is read in a single line of text? Because it's not 'map', it's more generalized. So the argument ('read' here) is applied to whatever is inside the second argument ('readFile ...'). Here xss2 - read `fmap` readFile output.txt is equivalent to xss2 - return . read = readFile output.txt or tmp - readFile output.txt let xss2 = read tmp 2) Trying to use 'fmap' illustrates 1) producing an error (see below): main = do let xss = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8],[9]] writeFile output.txt (show xss) xss2 - fmap read (readFile output.txt) :: [[Int]] print xss2 fmap read (readFile output.txt) is of type IO [[Int]], not [[Int]]. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Comment Syntax
Guy guytsalmave...@yahoo.com writes: Out of interest, is there any other language where the comment delimiter is invalid if immediately followed by a symbol? Another quaint example, in shell scripts, lines starting with '#' are comments, except when the first line starts with '#!'. Admittedly, this is still a comment as far as the shell is concerned, it's the OS that is intercepting the comment's contents and acting on it. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Comment Syntax
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com writes: And #! in the first line is also treated as a comment in Haskell code so that you can run it as a script. True. But then you're allowed to add arbitrary symbols after it, I think. At least, GHC seems happy about it. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Comment Syntax
Guy guytsalmave...@yahoo.com writes: Out of interest, is there any other language where the comment delimiter is invalid if immediately followed by a symbol? Perl has a rather infamous example where the comment syntax may depend on run-time properties - would that count? whatever / 25 ; # / ; die this dies!; Depending on the definition of 'whatever', the # might introduce a comment - or it might not. Anyway, I think very few languages allow definition of new symbolic operators, so it's hard to make a useful comparison. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Iteratees again
dm-list-haskell-c...@scs.stanford.edu writes: leaking file descriptors ...until they are garbage collected. I tend to consider the OS fd limitation an OS design error - I've no idea why there should be some arbitrary limit on open files, as long as there is plenty of memory around to store them. But, well, yes, it is a real concern. parsers that parse every possible input and never fail. I guess I need to look into how iteratees handle parse failure. Generally, for me a parse failure means program failure - either the data is corrupt, or the program is incorrect. Thus, for anything other than a toy program, your code actually has to be: readFoo path = bracket (hOpen path) hclose $ hGetContents = (\s - return $! decodeFoo s) No, I can't do that in general, because I want to process a Foo (which typically is or contains a list of records) incrementally. I can't assume the file or its data are smalle enough to fit in memory. It is important that readFoo returns a structure that can be consumed lazily - or perhaps it can be iteratee all the way up. Which is still not guaranteed to work if Foo contains thunks, so then you end up having to write: readFoo path = bracket (hOpen path) hclose $ \h - do s - hGetContents h let foo = decodeFoo s deepseq foo $ return foo I think this - or rather, having Foo's records be strict - is a good idea anyway. The previous discussion about frequency counts seems to indicate that this goes equally well for iteratees. Thanks for the elaborate answer. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] *GROUP HUG*
Michael Litchard mich...@schmong.org writes: I disagree. I'm by no means proficient in Haskell. And, I never bothered learning PHP. I will when I need to. PHP programmers are a dime a dozen. ..and since PHP programmers are a dime a dozen, any decent manager (who, after all, has an MBA and knows that employees¹ are expendable and interchangeable means of production) will select PHP as the technology for her next project. Gresham's law states roughly that bad money drives out good. I thus propose a corollary: bad languages drive out good. It's been my experience that Haskell is a tool one may use to distinguish oneself from the hoi-poloi. This is important when you live in an area where the baker down the street has a CS degree. Are you saying CS degrees are a dime a baker's dozen? -k ¹) With the sole exception of managers, of course. -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe