The mekk.fics library allows one to write asynchronous FICS bots and utilities in Python. I created it mostly by factoring reusable code out of WatchBot sources, polishing it here and there, extending test suite, and documenting.

In fact, you are to see some parts of WatchBot core here.

We will write very simple (even primitive) bot, aimed to perform a kind of a player registration - it will allow players to join something, and it will save not only their names, but also their current standard rating.

Perl will be used in this example, due to the presence of Net::Telnet library and good regexp support it is fairly suitable for the task.

It can be also of some interest for people wishing to write a FICS client interface (playing program), and maybe even for those wanting to write some program interacting with another telnet-based game server, be it ICC, WCL, or something else (as far as I know some go and backgammon servers also work similarly).