Hong

This is a pong clone written in haskell.

Installing and Running

1. First get the Haskell Platform.

2. Clone the project

   git clone git://github.com/Tarrasch/Hong.git
   

3. Install the program (run these commands from the Hong directory)

   cabal update
   cabal configure
   cabal install
   

4. Run the program

   Hong
   

   Alternatively if you don't have the cabal bin folder in your $PATH.

   ~/.cabal/bin/Hong
   

Gameplay features

This implementation is as simple as can be, the most cool feature is the time manipulation functionality. To see the controls, just start the game from a terminal and it will print out the playing intsructions.

Technology

I've used Functional Reactive Programming to write this. Haskell is the language of choice and I used a very old library called Fal that provides the Reactive part. Fal is from the book Haskell School of Expression. So it is very simple.

Functional and Programming are well known terms, though Reactive needs some explenation. In Reactive Programming when you write z = x + y you actually mean z(t) = x(t) + y(t). Everything is implicitly functions of time. And it turns out to be very expressive in creating games!

Note that Reactive is not neccesary a high-level paradigm! On the contrary, VHDL is Reactive! (since circuits are asynchronus they can be seen as functions of time)

Side-effect free

Haskell is a pure language, which means functions have no side effects. Why is that good? Well, it's very good for seperating logic from IO! And to test ones program (unit tests) one must do it in a side-effect free way. Otherwise a test that passes today might fail tommorow!

Thank god I used a library (Fal) that already have seperated all IO for me, actually, the only function with side-effects is the main function, which simply only starts the game! That's it!

Actual testing

I would be a hypocrit praising purity without writing actual unit tests. I've used hspec, get it with

cabal install hspec

and after you have successfully installed the game you can easily run the tests

ghci test/HongTest.hs
(.. lots of output ..)
*HongTest> hspec specs

Of course the tests pass.

Fal

I've manually included the Fal files. To hierarcially seperate code I written from library code I put Fal-files in the folder Fal/.

Fal is very small, and lacks features, so I was forced to add my addendum to it, I called it Fal.hs.

Middleware

One can write middlewares that work for all Fal programs. I've examplified this by writing a time manipulating middleware, which allows the user to increase/decrease game speed and pause the game. That exact same middleware can be used for anything written in Fal!

Other middleware one could have written:

• Allow any game to be restartable
• Allow any game to have save states.