There are many examples of games which use boards: chess, checkers, go, etc. Many people starting out at programming and/or game programming are very much tempted to code a board game. It looks like such a game would be easy to build at first sight.

Even more sophisticated games sometimes use a grid system, which looks a lot like boards as well. In a grid system the movements of a given agent are bound do discrete positions. Although the user may not see the board underneath pretty graphics, it is a board game.

Having in mind the sort of operations such games have to make on boards, I ask: what are the best representations for a board in Haskell?

In many languages a NxN array seems like a good pick. In Haskell, most would translate that into lists of lists. I know I have. However, traversing those lists to get a position, calculate where a piece or agent could go, etc., feels awkward and unefficient. Beside the point already made, we have no type safe guarantee that our 64x64 won't become a 63x63 + 65x1 board due to some misbehaving function.

It strikes me that list of lists is not a great board representation. I think STArrays are a better pick; from the perspective of translating an NxN array into Haskell, at least. However, maybe there is an even more elegant way to deal with a board in Haskell. I hope you can help me out figuring it out.

[]'s

Rafael