osfameron’s blog

More Countdown: laziness, Scheme, and German frogs

2008-06-20T07:32:16Z

The Countdown code I showed you isn't really taking advantage of Haskell's laziness. We should only have to check entries up until the point that we have enough matches (in the current code 'take 4 $ getAnagrams') and that's good. However, we ha...

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Schwartzian transform in Haskell

2008-06-18T21:53:28Z

In the last post, I mentioned that we might be able to improve the performance of our sort using a "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartzian_transform". This basically involves precaching the expensive calculation (in this case, length), sorti...

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Countdown words game solver in Haskell

2008-06-18T12:02:12Z

Will on #geekup has been working on a Countdown letters and numbers game solver written in Python. I thought it'd be fun to try to do it in Haskell, and started with the letters game (anagram) solver. Starting with a string of jumbled letters,...

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Monads in Perl (take 1)

2008-06-12T22:27:26Z

I've been away for a while from Haskell so I thought I should do some revision and really get my head around Monads. While I plodded through the wonderful "meet the monads" tutorial, I decided that the best way to learn would be to do. By implem...

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F# talk in Liverpool

2008-05-16T07:35:07Z

I'd been out of Liverpool for 3 years or so, and I completely missed GeekUp: a loosely affiliated, grassroots tech meetup society in the North West. The Liverpool branch is pretty active, and linked with various other groups, such as the DotNet ...

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Monad Wars - code online

2007-11-28T09:19:59Z

Chessguy pointed out that it's currently hard to play along with the monad wars code. It would be nice for the posts to be “literate haskell”, where sections preceded by “>“ characters are valid Haskell. The idea is great - that you can mix secti...

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Monad Wars - 3: Command line actions

2007-11-27T07:52:19Z

After the last post, we have parser actions that can recognise an integer or an item of merchandise. Now we need to be able to process a command, like “jet bronx” or “buy 4 lambdas”. Let's start off with this basis: > parseCommand = parseMap co...

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Monad Wars - 2.5: some comments and corrections

2007-11-27T07:50:45Z

One of the advantages of demonstrating your ignorance in public is that you may receive useful corrections... thanks to everyone who replied on these recent posts, I found the comments very instructive, and thought it was worth writing up as a ne...

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Monad Wars - 2: the command line

2007-11-26T08:46:32Z

This time around, we're going to look at how we'll turn user input into commands in Monad Wars. I think that the easiest option to implement will also be very convenient to play with: a command line where we issue commands like: $ buy 4 foo $ ...

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Monad Wars - 1: the Prompt

2007-11-23T13:22:27Z

A lot of learning projects involve writing games: people have written clones of Tetris, Asteroids, Space Invaders, and even first person shooters (Frag) in Haskell. As I'm far less clever than these people, I thought I'd start with something a bi...

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