On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 4:08 PM, Yves Parès
Hello Cafe,
I have a question about program design. Let's say I have a simple sequential game (a TicTacToe for instance, but with more than 2 players). I have a Player datatype which is like:
data Player m = Player { plName :: String, -- unique for each player plTurn :: GameGrid -> m Move -- called whenever the player must play }
As you may guess, the 'm' type variable is intended to be a Monad. The goal is that every player has his own monad. For instance : - a human player needs to interact with the program, so its monad would be IO, or an instance of MonadIO. - a network player, which transparently sends the game state and receives moves through network, must also have access to IO to play. - an AI doesn't need to interact with the outside of the program, so its monad can be the one we want (e.g. Identity).
First, do you think it is a good way to design the program? I want the game to be totally independent of the players who are currently playing. They can be humans, AIs, AIs and network players and humans, and so on.
But when running the game, the program cannot "switch" from a player's monad to another. If we want every player to run in his own monad, I think we have to stack every players' monad, and lift their actions each time they have to play. This is not a problem, the sole condition now is that every player has type: (Monad m, MonadTrans m) => Player m.
But I think it's a little bit of overkill, and it may be a little bit complicated to implement such a thing. What I try to avoid is having every player running in IO monad.
Do you have any suggestion?
----- Yves Parès
Your desires remind me of the MonadPrompt package http://hackage.haskell.org/package/MonadPrompt, which IIRC, has been used in some game demos to provide abstraction from IO/test harness/pure AI etc. -- gwern