First steps with Haskell text API improvement

July 06 2009

I've spent a couple of hours over the past few evenings starting to make good on my recent promise to clean up the Haskell text library. This is part progress report, part solicitation of input. I renamed the split function to splitChar: splitChar :: Char -> Text -> [Text] The… read more

What’s in a text API?

June 30 2009

Now that I’ve got the DEFUN 2009 schedule sorted out (you are coming, aren’t you?), I’ve had time to take a breath and think about the Haskell text library again. Its API is currently a clone of the ancient and venerable Haskell list API. If you’ve used the list API… read more

Case conversion and text 0.3

June 07 2009

I've released version 0.3 of the Haskell text package to Hackage. It supports the new error handling API that I wrote about the other day, along with proper support for case conversion. What is "proper support for case conversion"? Correctly converting the case of a single Unicode code point can… read more

Dealing with encoding errors in Data.Text

June 05 2009

I've spent a few nights improving the Haskell text library's resilience in the face of bad input. In version 0.2, the library simply calls error if presented with invalid input. This is clearly not adequate, since there's no shortage of data out there that either contains coding errors or is… read more

I put a pidgit in your widget so you can fidget while you calculate pi

May 28 2009

I purposely pay little attention to the Computer Language Benchmarks Game, but I couldn't resist this: Arnaud Payement wrote a nice Haskell implementation of the pidgits benchmark, which was quickly eclipsed by a C implementation. The speed difference between the two is small, just 23%, so I tried to see… read more

Streaming Unicode support for Haskell: text 0.2

May 23 2009

I just released version 0.2 of the Haskell text library that I announced back in February. This version fixes a number of bugs, but much more significantly, it adds a streaming mode: you can process a huge amount of text lazily using a small, fixed amount of memory, while maintaining… read more

Mercurial book is now in production, and a little gift

May 15 2009

As of about a week ago, O’Reilly’s production team has the manuscript of the Mercurial book. Thanks to everyone who has submitted so many comments during the writing process! If you watch the Mercurial development tree, you’ll have noticed that over the past few years, I’ve done almost no work… read more

Slides from my Erlang Factory talk this morning

May 01 2009

I had a wonderful time at the Bay Area Erlang Factory this morning, speaking to an Erlang audience about the different perspective that Haskell brings to functional programming. It was a relaxed and friendly crowd, and speaking to a receptive audience is always a thrill. Here are the slides from… read more

DEFUN 2009 call for talks and tutorials

March 31 2009

ACM SIGPLAN 2009 Developer Tracks on Functional Programming http://www.defun2009.info/ Edinburgh, Scotland, September 3 and 5, 2009 The workshop will be held in conjunction with ICFP 2009 http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/icfp09.html Important dates Proposal Deadline: June 5, 2009, 0:00 UTC Notification: June 19, 2009 DEFUN 2009 invites functional programmers and researchers who know how to solve problems with functional progamming to… read more

Mercurial: The Definitive Guide

March 27 2009

If you’ve looked at the Mercurial book site in the past 24 hours, you’ll have noticed that both its look and the name of the book have changed. First, the cosmetic news. The change in appearance is due to my switching over to the system I used to publish Real… read more

Scintillation

March 01 2009

I think that this video is remarkably beautiful. SCINTILLATION, by Xavier Chassaing on Vimeo. read more

Finally! Fast Unicode support for Haskell

February 27 2009

On behalf of the Data.Text team, I am delighted to announce the release of preview versions of two new packages: text 0.1 Fast, packed Unicode text support, using a modern stream fusion framework. text-icu 0.1 Augments the text package with comprehensive character set conversion support and normalization (and soon more), via bindings… read more

Speaking at Bay Area Erlang Factory in April

February 22 2009

My friends at Erlang Training and Consulting are running an organising an event in Palo Alto at the end of April: Erlang Factory. If you’re interested in the ferment of ideas and activity around functional programming, this promises to be an exciting occasion. To me, one of the great attractions… read more

Fun with Haskell view patterns

January 11 2009

One of the pleasant new features in GHC 6.10 is the long-awaited addition of view patterns. This feature is usually advertised as making it possible to pattern match against the values of an abstract type. An essential aspect of modular software design is that we don't want to expose the… read more

The 12 Days of EFF

December 16 2008

Via the ever industrious Danny O’Brien, we bring to you the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s end-of-year animation. Learn more about this video and support EFF! read more