[Haskell-beginners] Game of Life try

[Darren Grant]

If I may, as I'm sure many wizened functional programmers predicted, I
found that my built-in biases regarding how a computer language works were
a major hindrance to picking up Haskell quickly as they prevented me from
reading and writing it effectively. My colleagues think of mathy Haskell
guys as an odd breed. :)

Don't despair. Give yourself ample time with structured books like Learn
You a Haskell for the fundamentals to make sense. More specifically, I have
found that understanding Haskell's type system inside and out has been
critical to my effectiveness.

Cheers,
d



On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Mateusz Kowalczyk
<fuuzetsu at fuuzetsu.co.uk>wrote:

>
>  I recommend that you read a guide/tutorial/book on Haskell first, before
> you try to implement this. Having a very limited knowledge about the
> language will only provide frustration when your solution doesn't work when
> you try to approach it naively, trying to use methods from a very different
> language.
>
> A widely recommended book is Learn You A Haskell [1]. After reading it, it
> should become fairly obvious how to approach your problem as well as how to
> solve it. You'll soon realise that there's simply no need for things such
> as `while' or a mutable array.
>
> To just hint towards what you might want is  a function that takes a list
> (or list of lists, whatever your representation may be)) and returns a list
> with the next generation. You can then use any of the graphics libraries
> (or just print ASCII) to visualise the transformation. Again, this will be
> a lot easier when you actually study the basic language concepts first,
> instead of diving head-in and trying to hammer C++ into Haskell.
>
> [1] http://learnyouahaskell.com/
>
> Mateusz Kowalczyk
>
> Oops, forgot to CC the mailing list.
>
> On 04/01/13 20:41, Емануела Моллова wrote:
>
> Hello all! :) I'm new to Haskell and I would like to try to implement a
> simple version of Game of Life. I can imagine it in C++ for example, but I
> have a little difficulties in Haskell. All I can think for is a mutable
> array with all elements - 0 in the beginning and the user to be able to
> write in the coordinates of the cells, which are alive and this cells to
> become 1. Then to iterate through the array (but I'm not sure if I can
> iterate, there is no 'while' here) and to make the changes (but maybe I
> will need a new array for the changes, because when the first change
> happens, it will affect the result). Also I was thinking of how to make it
> visible, so I tried to make all 0-s red and all 1-s green, and after each
> iteration to clear the screen with ANSI so that it looks a bit like
> animation, but none of these ideas work... Here is an orientation in my
> ideas:
>
>  import Data.Array.IO
> import System.Console.ANSI
>
>  main :: IO ()
> main = do
>         arr <- newArray ((1,1), (10,10)) 0 :: IO (IOArray (Int, Int) Int)
>  writeAraay arr (1,1) 1
>  a <- readArray (1,1)
>   setSGR [SetColor Foreground Dull Red]
>         putStr [a]
>
>  Could you please suggest me what is a good place to store the
> information about my cells (mutable, unmutable array, lists, tuples...) and
> any ideas and tutorials at all would be really appreciated! Thank you very
> much in advance! :)
>
>
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