May 2009 HCAR Submissions

Last weekend was the submission deadline for contributions to the May 2009 edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report (HCAR). I absolutely love the HCAR; it’s a terrific and comprehensive source of information on all the amazing stuff people are doing with Haskell. I’m very grateful to the editor Janis Voightländer (and Andres Löh before him) for compiling the report, in my opinion he does a great service to the Haskell community. I can’t wait to get my hands on the upcoming edition!

Below are my submissions to the HCAR (free blogging material, yay!) with some additional notes.

dimensional: Statically checked physical dimensions

Report by: Björn Buckwalter
Status: active, mostly stable

Dimensional is a library providing data types for performing arithmetics with physical quantities and units. Information about the physical dimensions of the quantities/units is embedded in their types, and the validity of operations is verified by the type checker at compile time. The boxing and unboxing of numerical values as quantities is done by multiplication and division with units. The library is designed to, as far as is practical, enforce/encourage best practices of unit usage.

The core of dimensional is stable with additional units being added on an as-needed basis. In addition to the SI system of units, dimensional has experimental support for user-defined dimensions and a proof-of-concept implementation of the CGS system of units. I am also experimenting with forward automatic differentiation and rudimentary linear algebra.

The current release is compatible with GHC 6.6.x and above and can be downloaded from Hackage or the project web site. The primary documentation is the literate Haskell source code, but the wiki on the project web site has a few usage examples to help with getting started.

Further Reading

http://dimensional.googlecode.com

Dimensional was largely the project that enticed me to learn Haskell, and is the one that I am most proud of to date. It relies on some pretty tricky type-level hackery, stuff I would never have been able to pull off without the help of many papers ranging from Oleg Kiselyov’s amazing type-hacks to Hudak et al’s A History of Haskell.

Its primary shortcoming at present is the lack of Haddock documentation. Dimensional is written in a literate style and I think anyone reading the source will find the documentation pretty comprehensive and easy to follow (barring the fact that type hacking is pretty tricky business). Alas, with the last few years’ infrastructure improvements and increased (de facto) standardization in the community not having proper haddocks is a wart.

fad: Forward Automatic Differentiation

Report by: Björn Buckwalter
Participants: Barak A. Pearlmutter, Jeffrey Mark Siskind
Status: active

Fad is an attempt to make as comprehensive and usable a forward automatic differentiation (AD) library as is possible in Haskell. Fad (a) attempts to be correct, by making it difficult to accidentally get a numerically incorrect derivative; (b) item provides not only first-derivatives, but also a lazy tower of higher-order derivatives; (c) allows nested use of derivative operators while using the type system to reject incorrect nesting (perturbation confusion); (d) attempts to be complete, in the sense of allowing calculation of derivatives of functions defined using a large variety of Haskell constructs; and (e) tries to be efficient, in the sense of both the defining properties of forward automatic differentiation and in keeping the constant factor overhead as low as possible.

Version 1.0 of fad was uploaded to Hackage on April 3. Recent changes can be found via git clone git://github.com/bjornbm/fad.git

Further Reading

http://github.com/bjornbm/fad
http://flygdynamikern.blogspot.com/2009/04/announce-fad–10-forward-automatic.html

The majority of work on fad (including most of the above report) is actually being done by Barak Pearlmutter, principial of the Hamilton Institute’s Brain and Computation Lab. As you can understand his brain is in a different league than mine when it comes to anything related to computation. My contribution at this stage is mostly reviewing his patches (often struggling to understand them) and providing guidance and support on Haskell infrastructure and conventions.

leapseconds-announced

Report by: Björn Buckwalter
Status: stable, maintained

The leapseconds-announced library provides an easy to use static LeapSecondTable with the leap seconds announced at library release time. It is intended as a quick-and-dirty leap second solution for one-off analyses concerned only with the past and present (i.e. up until the next as of yet unannounced leap second), or for applications which can afford to be recompiled against an updated library as often as every six months.

Version 2009 of leapseconds-announced contains all leap seconds up to 2009–01–01. A new version will be uploaded if/when the IERS announces a new leap second.

Further Reading

http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/leapseconds-announced
http://github.com/bjornbm/leapseconds-announced

Not much to add about leapseconds-announced other than that it fills a need I have. I elaborated a little on what it is (and what it doesn’t try to be) in the announcement thread.

That’s it! I hope to have another project or two to report on in the November edition…