Professional Reading

I finally got my copy of The Haskell School of Expression. It looks like an interesting book, and will perhaps be more engaging than the other Haskell book I've got, Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming.

As I read the introduction, I downloaded a copy of the most recent edition of Hugs98, which is an interpreter implementing (most of) the Haskell 98 standard. This, and the Hugs Graphics Lib, are used in all the examples in the book. There is just one problem:

Warning! The Hugs Graphics Library does not work with the February 2001 release of Hugs. We hope to release a fix soon..

And the 2000 release of Hugs98 is nowhere to be found. Since I'm not so expert a Haskell user as to be confident patching libraries (thanks to the helpful soul who made some such suggestions), I will be waiting for said fix. In the meantime I am left reading...

Modern C++ Design, by Andrei Alexandrescu. I've read his articles posted to the Usenet groups comp.lang.c++.moderated and comp.std.c++, and the guy is a mad genius! The first chapter of the book is interesting, and of course, it is all about features which are not available in the version of the C++ compiler we use at work. Fortunately, there is one inexpensive compiler I can get from Comeau Computing, for around $50, which Alexandrescu says supported all the features used in the book, so I'll probably be getting a copy. First I'll try the 2.95.2 version of gcc, but I suspect there will be problems...