[Haskell-cafe] Parsers for Text Adventures

[Tim Wawrzynczak]

Hi Mark,

I recently ported Conrad Barski's 'Casting SPELs in Lisp' to Haskell (a text
adventure game).

I had some of these problems as well, and you can find my code on Hackage
(the package is called Advgame).

Some things in there might be of some help.

Cheers,
 - Tim

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 7:30 AM, Mark Spezzano <mark.spezzano at chariot.net.au
> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am writing a Text Adventure game in Haskell (like Zork)
>
> I have all of the basic parser stuff written as described in Hutton's
> Programming in Haskell and his associated papers. (I'm trying to avoid using
> 3rd party libraries, so that I can learn this myself)
>
> Everything that I have works (so far...) except for the following problem:
>
> I want to define a grammar using a series of Verbs like this:
>
> data Verb = Go | Get | Jump | Climb | Give etc, etc deriving (Show, Read)
>
> and then have my parser "get" one of these Verb tokens if possible;
> otherwise it should do something (?) else like give an error message stating
> "I don't know that command"
>
> Now, Hutton gives examples of parsing strings into string whereas I want to
> parse Strings into my Verbs
>
> So, if the user types "get sword" then it will tokenise "get" as type
> Verb's data constructor Get and perhaps "sword" into a Noun called Sword
>
> My parser is defined like this:
>
> newtype Parser a = Parser (String -> [(a, String)])
>
> So I CAN give it a Verb type
>
> but this is where I run into a problem....
>
> I've written a Parser called keyword
>
> keyword :: Parser Verb
> keyword = do x <- many1 letter
>                        return (read x)
>
> (read this as
> "take-at-least-one-alphabetic-letter-and-convert-to-a-Verb-type")
>
> which DOES work provided that the user types in one of my Verbs. If they
> don't, well, the whole thing fails with an Exception and halts processing,
> returning to GHCi prompt.
>
> Question: Am I going about this the right way? I want to put together lots
> of "data" types like Verb and Noun etc so that I can build a kind of "BNF
> grammar".
>
> Question: If I am going about this the right way then what do I about the
> "read x" bit failing when the user stops typing in a recognised keyword. I
> could catch the exception, but typing an incorrect sentence is just a typo,
> not really appropriate for an exception, I shouldn't think. If it IS
> appropriate to do this in Haskell, then how do I catch this exception and
> continue processing.
>
> I thought that exceptions should be for exceptional circumstances, and it
> would seem that I might be misusing them in this context.
>
> Thanks
>
> Mark Spezzano
>
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