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Haskell has CGI and animation libraries, as well as a system for writing music. There are foreign library interfaces and highly optimizing compilers, database interfaces and graph visualizers.
Libraries and Tools in Haskell
Haskell in Practice
Here are some books and papers about how to program in Haskell and functional languages in general.
I particularly recommend Hudak's book; Paul himself is a very clear teacher and lecturer, as is Zhong Shao, who does research in ML (Standard ML of NJ). I think SML is the only functional language around whose semantics are completely specified.
Follow these links and learn about Erlang (in massive production use at Ericsson), high level abstraction through functions defined via structural induction over datatypes, monads, layered functionality used to build parsers (via parser combinators), and a type theory for object-oriented programming.

You can find an introductory article to solar and laser driven lightsails on my website. It was written more than a few years ago now, back when I was an undergraduate, but its aged fairly well (unfortunately). If you want a really in-depth look at this topic I'd recommend Colin McInnes' book Solar Sailing: Technology, Dynamics and Mission Applications .

>The "G" stands for "Glascow"

That would be "Glasgow", with a 'g'.

-dair (who used to live there)

This is rather amusing hehehe. Wonder if someone could change that to GNU, BSD, Linux, or heck lots of things apply there.

Actually, you can tell from the suerscript-one's that Jon doesn't use a Unix box either. He in fact typed the text on a Mac.

The oldest Mac-charset to ISO-charset converters will turn Macintosh curly-quotes into ISO-8859-1 superscript-one characters, because the ISO encoding doesn't contain curly-quote entities. (For more information, read these Guidelines to use 8-bit character codes.)

As for speculation about which product might be doint this to his writing: I have Microsoft Office 98 for Macintosh, and Word does not do this when I save curly-quotes either as text or as html. This is a guess, but a more likely culprit is the Fetch FTP application, which has a setting that controls whether Fetch does ISO-charset to Macintosh-charset conversion of data in text file transfers. The default setting of this option is "on", which would lead to the corruption in Jon's posted answers.

For more reading, see

• ISO-8859-1 and the Mac platform
• A tutorial on character code issues
• A list of Jukka Korpela's documents

As Michael pointed out, Nemesis uses a completely different architecture to most other operating systems (ie. migrating OS code into applications) to allow it achieve QoS. You simply cannot do this with a UNIX variant, because you are still relying on time in the kernel (or shared servers) to some of the work that should be accounted to you.

Just for interest, Nemesis is now available for download at Sourceforge. You can also download the packages from Glasgow (one of the partner sites) here.

>...it was notoriously slow...

Notoriously slow? I worked on Nemesis and it worked fine. FYI we even had things like Hereitc running on it (it supports X-apps) and were able to apply QoS to them.

One problem is that by default Nemesis has heap paranoia turned on - this is a debugging aid that checks the heap every time you do a malloc. Turn that off and Nemesis runs quite quickly.

Nemesis was designed from the ground up to be a QoS operating system, including base support for things like asynchronous I/O. I'd imagine that Nemesis would do a better job of providing QoS over all resources than a hacked BSD.

For example: Under tradiational X-Windows you have a shared server - so while applications can get guarentees, the moment they start using the X-Server you lose all your benefits - your subject to a shared resource. Nemesis, on the other hand, is vertically structured so that almost all work it done in the client's process. Thus your use of the X-Server is subject to your scheduling parameters - thus no one can steal your time!.

Have a look at http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~mich ael/work/bin/msn99.pdf which explains the above in more detail.

> ...and had little hardware support.

But didn't Linux until recently? :-)

-- Michael

I've seen a lot of complaints that the SCSL isn't open enough - but does it need to be? I can't really see anyone privately trying to fab a chip anyway... :-) I'm yet to be convinced that Open Source hardware will work until desktop PCs come with FPGAs in them.

As a PhD student trying to design a new processor type, having the source of an existing processor to modify, rather than write one from scratch, is great. It'll save me a lot of time hopefully. From reading the list of points on the web page, this is more the type of market they're aiming at with this release. That and allowing SoC developers "try before they buy". More of a shareware licence than an open source licence in the later respect.

Just my thoughts on the matter :-)

-- Dougal

BTW: Can anyone see the actual download page for this? I can only find the download for the picoJava core.

We might as well just be done with it and start using the IPA. The only problems we'd have then are dialectal variations in pronunciation (e.g., my wife (a ling grad student) has a book called 'a course in phonetics' which has the IPA representation of both the American and British standard pronunciations, and it's surprising how many differences there are).

Anyway, does anyone really expect loony right-wing pious twits from Bible-Belt-land to actually understand Teletubbies!?!??!?! After all, the show's aimed at young toddlers whose minds are developing and are open to new ideas!!!!! It's not aimed at old fossils whose minds are withered and are closed shut!!!!!! ;)

Anyway, it's old news- it's part of a developing Teletubbies urban myth in the US, a bit like the gerbil-up-the-rectum story...

===

This sort of "Oh, it'll teach our kids to speak funny" bollox happened early on in the UK as well, and it's been proved completely wrong, as it's been demonstrated to help it's target audience (2-3 year olds) learn how to talk!!!!!!! The script is actually written by a qualified linguist, believe it or not!!!! There's a really helpful page by the Beeb with all the info....

As for "stoned teenagers", that's just because the UK seems to be really great at making really wierd childrens programs that people seem to read lots of differe nt meanings into!!!!! (eg the Magic Roundabout, Button Moon, Captain Pugwash, etc.) In terms of content, the prog is actually pretty similar to the 1970s pre-school kids show Playschool, and that was considered the epitome of education TV in the UK!!!!!!!

Old Fart!