Haskell Weekly News: Issue 184

   Welcome to issue 184 of the HWN, a newsletter covering developments in
   the Haskell community. This release covers the week of May 22 to 28, 2011.

Announcements

   The newsletter has not been posting new library announcements, but Ivan
   Lazar's announcement of his new wl-pprint-text library had to be an
   exception. Way to be creative Ivan!
   http://goo.gl/C6tu0

   Simon Marlow wrote in to announce CamHac: (Haskell Hackathon in
   Cambridge, UK) during August 12 to 14, 2011. Registration is free, but
   they are limited to 50 people, so sign up soon!
   http://goo.gl/BySLB

Quotes of the Week

   * Henning Thielemann: [On a slow solution to Euler's totien function]
     It's declarative and may help to verify more efficient
     implementations.

   * KC: Librarians have been struggling for years with classifying
     topics; I don't imagine classifying coding libraries as any easier.

   * max ulidtko: [on the *group hug* thread] Wow. I just subscribed to
     the list just an hour ago or so, and already receiving hugs!

   * Jacek Generowicz: What would be the point of asking non-ignorant
     questions, unless it is a rhethorical one?

Re: ICFP Programming Contest 2011

This is a reminder that the ICFP Programming Contest 2011 will be
starting in two weeks.  See:
http://www.icfpcontest.org/2011/05/contest-announcement.html

Participants would need to prepare some virtual (or physical) machine
running Debian squeeze.  See:
http://www.icfpcontest.org/2011/05/judges-machine-and-system-environment.html
 (You would only need an environment compatible with the guest, not
the host.  There exists various virtual machine software such as
VirtualBox and VMware Player.)

We look forward to your participation!

        ICFPC 2011 Oraganizers

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 6:00 PM, Eijiro Sumii <eijiro.sumii <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear functional programmers,
>
> We have published the following announcement at:
>
>  http://www.icfpcontest.org/
>
> Please enjoy,
>
>  Eijiro Sumii (2011 Contest Chair)
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>                    ICFP Programming Contest 2011
>
>                     http://www.icfpcontest.org/

[JOB] NYU's Center for Genomics and Systems Biology seeks Functional Programmer

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[CFP] International Workshop on Rigorous Protocol Engineering (WRiPE 2011)

This workshop on the construction of correct Internet protocols may
be of interest to the Haskell community.
--

1st International Workshop on Rigorous Protocol Engineering (WRiPE 2011)

Co-located with the 19th IEEE International Conference on Network
Protocols (ICNP 2011), Vancouver, Canada, on October 17th 2011.
http://wripe11.cis.upenn.edu/

WRiPE is an inter-disciplinary workshop that will bring together
researchers from the networking, formal methods and programming
languages communities.  ICNP started nearly twenty years ago as a
conference focused on the application of formal methods to the
design and analysis of protocols primarily from the telecommunication
space. This initial focus on formal methods has diminished over the
years as ICNP has shifted towards research on Internet protocols.
The aim of WRiPE is to reinvigorate and revitalize the application
of formal methods to the design and analysis of network protocols.

We think the time is ripe for this type of workshop because (1)
verification techniques have matured greatly in the last few decades,
(2) verification tools such as model checkers, theorem provers, and
SAT/SMT solvers have attracted a sizable user base, and (3) such
techniques and tools have not traditionally been applied to network
protocols (in particular IP, which is now the dominant networking
technology).

By network protocols, we include traditional IP routing protocols,
wireless multi-hop routing, BGP policies, transport protocols,
application-layer overlay networks, and enterprise and data center
networks. These may also include security extensions to these
protocols, e.g. IPSec and Secure BGP, as well as protocols developed
using emerging software router platforms such as OpenFlow. By
verification technique, we mean any rigorous method of demonstrating
that an implementations satisfies a given specification, or that
reliable conclusions can be extracted from measurements.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
 * Correct-by-Construction methods: meta-model frameworks (logics,
   algebras, calculi, etc.) for Internet protocols
 * Applications of model checkers, theorem provers, and SAT/SMT solvers to
   Internet protocol design.
 * Domain specific languages (declarative, functional, or logic-based)
   that raise the level of abstraction in Internet protocol development.
 * Formal-methods based techniques for run-time verification and testing
   of Internet protocols.
 * Combining model checking and theorem proving for verifying
   Internet protocols.
 * Model finding techniques for network configuration.

Submission guidelines

Paper submission will not be blind. The submissions will indicate
the names or affiliations of the authors in the paper. Please do
not submit abbreviated versions of journal or conference papers.
In particular, submissions to WRiPE must not be concurrent with a
substantially similar submission to a conference or workshop,
including condensed versions of work that has been submitted and
is currently under review. We do encourage submissions of
work-in-progress based on novel and interesting ideas.  Submitted
papers must be no longer than six (6) pages in double-column format
with standard margins (i.e., at least one inch all around) and at
least a 10 point font. This length includes everything: figures,
tables, references, appendices and so forth. Longer submissions
will not be reviewed. Papers should include a title; full list of
authors, their organizations and email addresses; and an abstract
of fewer than 200 words.

Important Dates
 * Submission deadline for papers      June 20, 2011.
 * Notification to authors             July 30, 2011.
 * Camera ready due                    Aug 20, 2011.
 * Workshop date                       Oct 17, 2011.

Program Committee co-Chairs
 * Tim Griffin, Cambridge University
 * Boon Thau Loo, University of Pennsylvania

Program Committee
 * Edwin Brady, University of St Andrews
 * Randy Bush, Internet Initiative Japan
 * Ana Cavalli, TELECOM SudParis
 * Nate Foster, Cornell University
 * Alexander Gurney, University of Pennsylvania
 * Mike Gordon, Cambridge University
 * Stephane Grumbach, INRIA
 * Ranjit Jhala, UC San Diego
 * Anil Madhavapeddy, Cambridge University
 * Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University
 * Matthew Roughan, University of Adelaide
 * Georg Struth, University of Sheffield
 * Walter Willinger AT&T Labs Research
 * Pamela Zave, AT&T Labs Research

VSTTE 2012 : First Call for Papers

			   VSTTE 2012
Verified Software: Theories, Tools and Experiments
	 	      January 28-29, 2012
    Philadelphia, USA (co-located with POPL and VMCAI)
       https://sites.google.com/site/vstte2012/

The Fourth International Conference on Verified Software: Theories,
Tools, and Experiments  will take place on January 28-29, 2012.  The
focus of the conference is the development of systematic methods for
specifying, building, and verifying software.  The goal of
this conference is to advance the state of the art through the
interaction of theory development, tool evolution, and experimental
validation.  Historically,  the conference came out of the Verified
Software Initiative (VSI), a cooperative, international initiative
directed at the scientific challenges of large-scale software
verification.  A verification competition will be held in parallel 
to the conference. 

Topics of interest include:

* Specification and verification techniques
* Tool support for specification languages
* Tool for various design methodologies
* Tool integration and plug-ins
* Automation in formal verification
* Tool comparisons and benchmark repositories
* Combination of tools and techniques
(e.g. formal vs. semiformal, software specification
vs. engineering techniques)
* Customizing tools for particular applications
* Challenge problems
* Refinement methodologies
* Requirements modeling
* Specification languages
* Specification/verification case-studies
* Software design methods
* Program logic

SUBMISSIONS

Submitted research papers and system descriptions must be original and
not submitted for publication elsewhere.  Research paper submissions
are limited to 15 proceedings pages in LNCS format and must include a
cogent and self-contained description of the ideas, methods and
results, together with a comparison to existing work. System
descriptions are also limited to 15 proceedings pages in LNCS
format. Authors are encouraged to submit work in progress, particularly if the
work involves collaboration, theory unification, and tool integration.
Papers can be submitted at

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vstte2012

Submissions that arrive late, are not in the proper format, or are too
long will not be considered.  The proceedings of VSTTE 2012 will be
published by Springer-Verlag in the LNCS series.  Authors of accepted
papers will be requested to sign a form transferring copyright of
their contribution to Springer-Verlag.

IMPORTANT DATES

August 31, 2011:     Conference Paper Submission Deadline
October 20, 2011:    Notification of acceptance
November 15, 2011:   Final conference paper versions due
January 28-29, 2012: Main conference

CONFERENCE CHAIR

Ernie Cohen, European Microsoft Innovation Center 

PROGRAM CHAIRS

Rajeev Joshi,  NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Peter Müller, ETH Zurich
Andreas Podelski, University of Freiburg

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

To be announced

PUBLICITY CHAIR

Gudmund Grov, University of Edinburgh

STEERING COMMITTEE

Tony Hoare, Microsoft Research
Jay Misra, UT Austin
Natarajan Shankar, SRI International
Jim Woodcock, University of York

--

-- 
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award

I'm pleased to be able to relay the following announcement from ACM SIGPLAN:

The SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award is awarded to an 
institution or individual(s) to recognize the development a software 
system that has had a significant impact on programming language 
research, implementations, and tools. The impact may be reflected in the 
wide-spread adoption of the system or its underlying concepts by the 
wider programming language community either in research projects, in the 
open-source community, or commercially. The award includes a prize of 
$2,500.

For 2011, the winners of the award are

Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow of
Microsoft Research, Cambridge, for GHC

The award winners are donating the entirety of the prize money to 
haskell.org.

Citation:

Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow receive the SIGPLAN Software Award 
as the authors of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), which is the 
preeminent lazy functional programming system for industry, teaching, 
and research. GHC has not only provided a language implementation, but 
also established the whole paradigm of lazy functional programming and 
formed the foundation  of a large and enthusiastic user community.

GHC's flexibility has supported experimental research on programming 
language design in areas as diverse as monads, generalized algebraic 
data types, rank-N polymorphism, and software transactional memory. 
Indeed, a large share of the research on lazy functional programming in 
the last 5–10 years has been carried out with GHC.

Simultaneously, GHC's reliability and efficiency has encouraged 
commercial adoption, in the financial sector in institutions like Credit 
Suisse and Standard Chartered Bank, and for high assurance software in 
companies like Amgen, Eaton, and Galois.

A measure of GHC's influence is the way that many of the ideas of purely 
functional, "typeful programming" have been carried into newer languages 
and language features. including C#, F#, Java Generics, LINQ, Perl 6, 
Python, and Visual Basic 9.0.

Peyton Jones and Marlow have been visionary in the way that they have 
transitioned research into practice.  They have been role models and 
leaders in creating the large and diverse Haskell community, and have 
made GHC an industrial-strength platform for commercial development as 
well as for research.

Links:
http://www.sigplan.org/award-software.htm

http://corp.galois.com/blog/2011/6/7/sigplan-programming-languages-software-award.html

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Re: SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award

Congratulations, Simons!

Tom

On 6/7/11, Isaac Potoczny-Jones <ijones <at> galois.com> wrote:
> I'm pleased to be able to relay the following announcement from ACM SIGPLAN:
>
> The SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award is awarded to an
> institution or individual(s) to recognize the development a software
> system that has had a significant impact on programming language
> research, implementations, and tools. The impact may be reflected in the
> wide-spread adoption of the system or its underlying concepts by the
> wider programming language community either in research projects, in the
> open-source community, or commercially. The award includes a prize of
> $2,500.
>
> For 2011, the winners of the award are
>
> Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow of
> Microsoft Research, Cambridge, for GHC
>
> The award winners are donating the entirety of the prize money to
> haskell.org.
>
> Citation:
>
> Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow receive the SIGPLAN Software Award
> as the authors of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), which is the
> preeminent lazy functional programming system for industry, teaching,
> and research. GHC has not only provided a language implementation, but
> also established the whole paradigm of lazy functional programming and
> formed the foundation  of a large and enthusiastic user community.
>
> GHC's flexibility has supported experimental research on programming
> language design in areas as diverse as monads, generalized algebraic
> data types, rank-N polymorphism, and software transactional memory.
> Indeed, a large share of the research on lazy functional programming in
> the last 5–10 years has been carried out with GHC.
>
> Simultaneously, GHC's reliability and efficiency has encouraged
> commercial adoption, in the financial sector in institutions like Credit
> Suisse and Standard Chartered Bank, and for high assurance software in
> companies like Amgen, Eaton, and Galois.
>
> A measure of GHC's influence is the way that many of the ideas of purely
> functional, "typeful programming" have been carried into newer languages
> and language features. including C#, F#, Java Generics, LINQ, Perl 6,
> Python, and Visual Basic 9.0.
>
> Peyton Jones and Marlow have been visionary in the way that they have
> transitioned research into practice.  They have been role models and
> leaders in creating the large and diverse Haskell community, and have
> made GHC an industrial-strength platform for commercial development as
> well as for research.
>
> Links:
> http://www.sigplan.org/award-software.htm
>
> http://corp.galois.com/blog/2011/6/7/sigplan-programming-languages-software-award.html
>
>

ANNOUNCE: time-recurrence-0.5.2

I'm happy to announce the first fully functional release of time-recurrence:

    http://hackage.haskell.org/package/time-recurrence

As of version 0.5.2, the library is now powerful enough to express all
recurring dates which can be specified via the iCalendar RFC.

An example:

Generate the 15th and the 30th of the month, but only during the work week:

    > jan2011 = ptime "Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0400"
    > jan2012 = ptime "Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0400"
    > takeWhile (<= jan2012) $ recur monthly `starting` jan2011 $
    >   enumDays [15,30] >=>
    >   filterWeekDays [Monday .. Friday]

    [2011-02-15 04:00:00 UTC
    ,2011-03-15 04:00:00 UTC, 2011-03-30 04:00:00 UTC
    ,2011-04-15 04:00:00 UTC
    ,2011-05-30 04:00:00 UTC
    ,2011-06-15 04:00:00 UTC, 2011-06-30 04:00:00 UTC
    ,2011-07-15 04:00:00 UTC
    ,2011-08-15 04:00:00 UTC, 2011-08-30 04:00:00 UTC
    ,2011-09-15 04:00:00 UTC, 2011-09-30 04:00:00 UTC
    ,2011-11-15 04:00:00 UTC, 2011-11-30 04:00:00 UTC
    ,2011-12-15 04:00:00 UTC, 2011-12-30 04:00:00 UTC
    ]

As always I encourage feedback, criticism, suggestions and pull requests.

-Chris

Final call for papers: 8th CHR workshop

Apologies if you receive multiple copies
________________________________________

                            Call for Papers

     ------------------------------------------------------------
       Eighth International Workshop on Constraint Handling Rules
                               CHR 2011

                           September 9, 2011
                              Cairo, Egypt

            Co-located with the Second CHR Summer School
      ------------------------------------------------------------

             http://met.guc.edu.eg/events/chr2011/ws.html

    Introduction
    ------------

    The Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) language has become a
    major declarative specification formalism and implementation
    language for constraint reasoning algorithms and applications.
    Algorithms are often specified using inference rules, rewrite
    rules, sequents, proof rules or logical axioms that can be
    directly written in CHR.  Its clean semantics facilitates
    program design, analysis and transformation.  See the CHR
    website (http://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/CHR/) for more information.

    The aim of the CHR workshop series is to stimulate and promote
    international research and collaboration on topics related to
    the Constraint Handling Rules language. The workshop is a
    lively, friendly forum for presenting and discussing new results,
    interesting applications, and work in progress. Previous CHR
    workshops were organized in 2004 in Ulm (Germany), in 2005 in
    Sitges (Spain) at ICLP, in 2006 in Venice (Italy) at ICALP, in
    2007 in Porto (Portgual) at ICLP, in 2008 in Hagenberg (Austria)
    at RTA, in 2009 in Pasadena (California, US) at ICLP and in 2010
    in Edinburgh (Scotland) at ICLP.

    The workshop proceedings will be published as a technical report.

    Topics of Interest
    ------------------

    The workshop calls for full papers and short papers describing
    ongoing work on any aspect of CHR and related approaches. The
    following topics are relevant (this list is non-exhaustive):

     - (Logical) Algorithms
     - Applications
     - Comparisons with Related Approaches
     - Constraint Solvers
     - Critical Assessment
     - Expressivity and Complexity
     - Implementations and Optimization
     - Language Extensions (Types, Modules, ...)
     - Program Analysis
     - Program Transformation and Generation
     - Programming Environments (Debugging)
     - Programming Pearls
     - Programming Tools
     - Retractable Constraints
     - Semantics
     - System Descriptions

    Important Dates
    ---------------

      * Paper Registration (Abstract):  June 14, 2011
      * Paper Submission:               June 21, 2011
      * Notification of Authors:        July 21, 2011
      * Final version due:              August 16, 2011
      * Workshop date:                  September 9, 2011

    Submission Information
    ----------------------

    All papers must describe original, previously unpublished research,
    and must not simultaneously be submitted for publication elsewhere.
    They must be written in English. There are four submission categories:

    1. technical papers for describing technically sound, innovative
       ideas that can advance the state of the art of logic programming;
    2. application papers, where the emphasis will be on their impact on
       the application domain;
    3. system and tool papers, where the emphasis will be on the novelty,
       practicality, usability and general availability of the systems
       and tools described;
    4. technical communications, aimed at describing recent developments,
       new projects, and other materials that are not ready for main
       publication as standard papers.

    Technical papers, application papers, and system and tool papers
    must not exceed 15 pages including bibliography. The limit for
    technical communications is 10 pages.

    The authors are encouraged to submit their papers in Springer
    LNCS format. General information about the Springer LNCS series
    and the LNCS authors' instructions are available at the Springer
    LNCS/LNAI home page (http://www.springeronline.com/lncs/).

    Submissions can be made via the Easychair submission system,
    available at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=chr2011.

    Accepted papers will be published in a technical report.

    Organization
    ------------

    Program Committee:

      * Slim Abdennadher, German University in Cairo, Egypt
      * Henning Christiansen, Roskilde University, Denmark
      * Francois Fages, INRIA Rocquencourt, France
      * Thom Fruehwirth, Universitaet Ulm, Germany
      * Maurizio Gabbrielli, Universita di Bologna, Italy
      * Remy Haemmerle, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
      * Eric Monfroy, Universite de Nantes, France
      * Paolo Pilozzi, K.U.Leuven, Belgium
      * Jon Sneyers, K.U.Leuven, Belgium (chair)
      * Peter J. Stuckey, NICTA Victoria Laboratory, Australia
      * Armin Wolf, Fraunhofer FIRST, Germany

    Workshop Coordinator:

      * Jon Sneyers, K.U.Leuven (Belgium)

Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm

Parallel GHC project: new opportunity for an organisation to participate

GHC HQ and Well-Typed are pleased to announce a new opportunity for an
organisation to take part in the Parallel GHC Project.

The project started in November 2010 with four industrial partners, and
consulting and engineering support from Well-Typed. Each organisation is
working on its own particular project making use of parallel Haskell.
The overall goal is to demonstrate successful use of parallel Haskell
and along the way to apply engineering effort to any problems with the
tools that the partner organisations might run into.

We have capacity to support another partner organisation for the
remaining duration of the project (at least another 12 months).
Organisations do not need to contribute financially but should be
prepared to make a significant commitment of their own time. Familiarity
with Haskell would be helpful, but Haskell expertise is not needed.
Partner organisations' choice of projects is similarly open-ended and
could be based on anything from pre-existing code bases to green field
endeavours.

We would welcome organisations interested in pure parallelism,
concurrency and/or distributed Haskell. Presently, two of our partner
organisations are using mainly pure parallelism and two are using
concurrency. What would be especially interesting for us is to diversify
this mix further by working with an organisation interested in making
use of of distributed Haskell, in particular the work highlighted in the
recent paper "Haskell for the Cloud" [1].

To help give an idea what participating in the Parallel GHC Project is
like, here is what some of what our current partner organisations have
to say:

        The Parallel GHC Project has enabled us to make steady progress
        towards our goals. Well-typed has provided support in the form
        of best practice recommendations, general engagement with the
        project, and directly coding up key components.

        I have been getting lots of help from Well-Typed, and enjoy
        our weekly meetings.
          -- Finlay Thompson, Dragonfly

        My organization is now trying to implement highly concurrent Web
        servers. After GHC 7 was released we faced several critical bugs
        in the new IO manager and one guy at Well-Typed kindly fixed all
        the bugs. This has been a big benefit for our organization.

        Another benefit is feedback/suggestions from Well-Typed.
        Well-Typed and our organization have meetings every other week
        and we report progress to each other. During the discussions, we
        can set the right direction to go in.
          -- Kazu Yamamoto, IIJ Innovation Institute Inc.

Well-Typed is coordinating the project, working directly with the
participating organisations and the Simons at GHC HQ. If you think your
organisation may be interested then get in touch with me via
info <at> well-typed.com

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/parallel/remote.pdf

--

-- 
Duncan Coutts, Haskell Consultant
Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/