Wednesday, April 17, 2013

HaTeX 3.6: Proposal for Texy class

Description

This is a proposal for a new feature I would like to see (and implement) in HaTeX for its next version. It consists in a new type class, with tentative name Texy (tex-like or tex-ify shortened). Other names are to be proposed, if any other better is found. The class would contain every type whose values can be pretty-printed in LaTeX form. Therefore, the definition of the class would be as follows:

class Texy t where
  texy :: LaTeXC l => t -> l

We can also make Texy a subclass of Render, so we can have a default implementation using rendertex.

class Render t => Texy t where
  texy :: LaTeXC l => t -> l
  -- Default implementation
  texy = rendertex

But I am not sure if this is suitable. The purpose of Texy is to build, from Haskell values, more complex LaTeX expressions than just rendering to Text, which, in the other hand, it is no more than a Show instance after all. It may work with numbers but not with more complex values like fractions or matrices.

Applications

A first application could be Rational pretty-printing as fractions using the frac function. However, we also have a problem here: the constructor % for rational numbers is already in use in our library. Perhaps we should rename the comment operator to %:? I have not seen an extensive use of this operator yet.

We would also be able to create LaTeX values for tuples, resizing the parenthesis in the tuple appropriately using autoParens.

Another application, perhaps more sofisticated, is pretty-printing matrices. Since the elements of the matrix would be a Texy instance as well, we can use texy to pretty-print to LaTeX matrices which may contain fractions or any other user-supplied value. This is an interface much more flexible than the current one (using a plain Render instance for the elements).

When rendering trees (see Text.LaTeX.Packages.Trees.Qtree), we are already using a LaTeXC l => (a -> l) parameter in order to pretty-print the elements of the tree. This is a more free version of the Texy class, which allow the user to supply different ways to generate LaTeX values from a single type. However, this is not a point against the current proposal, since this functionality can be kept as it is and added wherever is needed.

I honestly think this would be a good improvement.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Haskell Platform from source in Linux

So I spent my day installing Haskell in my new Linux (Ubuntu-12.10) machine. Also, I have cooked a delicious cake. :)

In brief, these are the minimum packages I needed to install before starting with Haskell:

  • libgmp3c2. GHC needs this to perform arbitrary precision arithmetic. You may also need libgmp-dev.
  • zlib1g-dev. Needed for the zlib library in the Haskell Platform.
  • freeglut3-dev. Nedeed for the Open GL bindings in the Haskell Platform.

If the Haskell Platform configure still complains about the Open GL C library, did you try to install libgl1-mesa-dev?

Stop looking further! This is all you need to get the Platform installed from the source. Well, this, and the source by itself. Once you have this just follow the instructions in GHC and the Haskell Platform to finish your installation. Also note that linking of executables requires tons of memory. This is what killed my PC. If this happens to you, you should set swappiness to 10. That may solve the problem. If not, you can always try with a lighter version of Linux.

Good luck, haskellers!