[Icfp04-discuss] why we, the organizers, did not provide a simulator

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, David Brown wrote:

> Haskell already has constructors for Right and Left.  We had to chose to
> either hide those from the prelude, or rename the internal keywords to
> TurnRight and TurnLeft.  We chose the later.  It only affected the
> parser.

We hid them from the Prelude, for what it's worth. I think it was
marginally helpful to be able to enter them directly from the contest
description when coding.

>  BTW, Haskell's read/show only took slight modifications to just
> directly be able to parse/generate the ants.

I was thinking that the organisers had deliberately chosen not to
parenthesise Marker n to force us to make such modifications :-)

Cheers,

Ganesh