[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Haskell Chess

[Maxime Henrion]

Steffen Mazanek wrote:
> Hello again,
> 
> first of all, thank you Don for your help in making hsChess accessible. 
> I have
> to have a look at darcs and cabal first :-)
> 
> I have added some more content and a discussion page to the wiki, please
> contribute your thoughts.
> 
> Furthermore I added a link to the german project and task description used
> in the exercises; the English version will be the wiki (although it has 
> no convert2tex
> function).
> 
> Best regards,
> Steffen

I stepped onto your mail and found it particularly interesting since
I'm currently writing a chess client in Haskell, using GTK+, glade
and the nice Cairo library :-).  It is called LambdaChess!

The code is completely embryonic and totally useless at the moment,
but there's a base for a decent GUI interface, with an SVG board,
so easily themable.  There is also some base code for a PGN file
parser written using Parsec, and the whole thing is cabalized.

The pieces aren't even drawn yet, but that should be quite easy to
do, and I've found a few nice SVG piece sets.  The PGN parser doesn't
completely parses SAN moves yet, nor does it parse NAG annotations.
It doesn't properly validates the presence of the mandatory tags,
and so on...  I guess I should stop since it's going to be huge if
I'm listing all the missing features :-).

Ultimately, it'd be nice if this code was able to handle local games
between two humans and also playing against the various chess engines
(crafty, gnuchess, sjeng, etc...).  If it was also able to connect
to FICS, it would be the absolute greatness :D.

If you or anyone else on this mailing list feels like joining the
fun, please do!

The code is available here:

  http://mu.org/~mux/LambdaChess/

Cheers,
Maxime