Happy Programmers’ Day!

2014-09-13T00:00:00Z

A feast isn’t a feast, though, until it has a proper way of celebrating it. The Pi Day, for instance, has one: you eat a pie (preferably exactly at 1:59:26.535am), but I haven’t heard of any way of celebrating the Programmers’ Day, so I had to invent one. An obvious way would be to write a program, preferably a non-trivial one, but that requires time and dedication, which not everyone is able to readily spare.

So here’s my idea: on Programmers’ Day, dust off a program that you wrote some time ago — something that is just lying around in some far corner of your hard disk, that you haven’t looked at in years, but that you had fun writing — and put it on GitHub for all the world to see, to share the joy of programming.

Let me initialize the new tradition by doing this myself. Here’s HAZE, the Haskellish Abominable Z-machine Emulator. It was my final assignment for a course in Advanced Functional Programming, in my fourth year at the Uni, way back in 2004. It is an emulator for an ancient kind of virtual machine, the Z-machine, written from scratch in Haskell. It allows you to play text adventure games, such as Zork, much in the vein of Frotz. It’s not very complete, and supports versions of the Z-machine up to 3 only, so newer games won’t run on it as it stands, but Zork is playable.

It probably won’t even compile in modern Haskell systems: it was originally written for GHC version 6.2.1, and extensively uses the FiniteMap data type, which was obsoleted shortly after and is no longer found in modern systems. I should have Linux and Windows binaries lying around (yes, I had compiled it under Windows, using MinGW/PDCurses); I’ll put them on GitHub once I find them.

My mind now wanders ten years back in time, to the days when I was writing it. It took me about three summer weeks to write HAZE from scratch, most of that time on a slow laptop where it took quite a lot of seconds to get GHC to compile even a simple thing. I would do some of it differently if I were doing it now — for one, the state of a ZMachine is a central datatype to HAZE, and you’ll find a lot of functions that take and return ZMachines, so a state monad is an obvious choice; I didn’t understand monads well enough back then. But I still remember how I had the framework in place already and I was adding implementations of Z-code opcodes, one by one, to ZMachine/ZCode/Impl.hs, recompiling, rerunning, getting messages about unimplemented opcodes, when all of a sudden I got the familiar message about a white house and a small mailbox. Freude!

I hope you enjoy looking at it at least half as much as I had enjoyed writing it.

Daniel Janus – Z-machine

Happy Programmers’ Day!