Stack can perform actions during building concurrently. I wanted to understand how it acheived that. IORef As a preliminary, Haskell provides for mutable references, in the IO monad. For example, the code below makes use of the mutable variable (of type IORef Int) created by action newIORef :: a -> IO (IORef a): The action […]
Haskell and GUI
I saw an introduction to GUI programming in Haskell by Vladislav Zavialov. In his video, he referred to Unix-like operating systems but not Windows. I wanted to reproduce his example on Windows. As is often the case, it was not straightforward. A test project I created a new project gtkTest using stack new gtkTest and […]
Stack and options
The Haskell Tool Stack’s stack command can run a Haskell source file as a script, making use of a Stack interpreter options comment at the start of the file. Stack’s stack script command can also run a script file, but it ignores any interpreter options comment – all Stack flags and arguments must be specified […]
Random numbers
A pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) is a function g -> (a, g) where the sequence of a values from its repeated application to the g values meets certain criteria. The System.Random module of the random package for Haskell exports a class RandomGen g which promises functions including genWord64 :: g -> (Word64, g). It also […]
Programming ligatures revisited
Since version 1.40, Visual Studio Code allows fine-grained control over OpenType font features. Windows Terminal v1.11.2921.0 (pre-released in v1.11.2421.0) now allows the same. However, Cascadia Code has gone backwards (from a Haskell perspective). I decided to swap Fira Code for Cascadia Code. Visual Studio Code In Visual Studio Code’s settings.json: cv02 turns on a variant […]
Unicode
The Haskell type Char represents Unicode code points. I was struggling with the output of certain Unicode characters by Haskell code on Windows Terminal, under Windows 11. Specifically: either did not work at all or, when the OEM code page was changed in PowerShell Core 7.2.1 from the default 437 to 65001 (UTF-8) (using command […]
Windows 11
Offered the opportunity to replace Windows 10 with Windows 11, I took it up. Having done so, I had mixed feelings. Chat The Chat app is integrated with Windows 11 and its icon appears on the Taskbar by default. At first, the app did not work at all, reporting only that it ran into unspecified […]
Reanimator revived
Over a year ago, I hit a dead end on Windows 10 with David Himmelstrup’s reanimate package. I returned to the package with a simple animation in mind. In the interim, things had moved on. I had no difficulty creating the animation and rendering it to a GIF image: Dependencies On Windows 10, the Haskell […]
gnuplot and Excel, scratching the surface
Microsoft’s Excel is ubiquitous in finance. The current version (version 2105) provides the Surface chart type, with four varieties of the chart: 3-D Surface, Wireframe 3-D Surface, Contour, and Wireframe Contour. The underlying data is provided as a rectangular grid or, rather, a list of series of data. The names of the series provide the […]
The big blue
On 9 July 2020, I received a new Dell XPS 8930. From about 13 August 2020, I have had a series of BugCheck events (Event ID 1001), logged in the System log. All of them, except two, were code 154. Could I find the cause? I thought I had but it was a false dawn. […]