Author: Dave Gomboc
Date: 12:03:59 09/19/98
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On September 14, 1998 at 12:44:16, Amir Ban wrote: >On September 14, 1998 at 09:05:33, Robert Hyatt wrote: >>IE it seems that the timing is right to do a *complete* protocol. Design it >>right from the ground up. And if the protocol is separated from the engine by >>using an interface program (as we do with winboard/xboard) then, for a temporary >>compatibility fix, a special auto232 to new-interface-spec program could be >>written to filter/adjust messages as needed... with the long-term goal of >>phasing this kludge out.. >> > >What for ? > >You are thinking about this the wrong way. Nobody abandons an old established >standard for such superficial reasons. I don't think the reasons are superficial. Particularly where it's possible to provide a bridge back to the existing protocol, it is quite reasonable to undertake such an endeavor. It's when people don't re-engineer something in a clean matter, but hack at it for years and years going through contortions to add small new features and making it uglier and uglier in the process that I get pissed off, because eventually I will have to add something, so I'll get to the code, and it's a big piece of shit. Automatically communicating chess moves to another program is a simple enough task that, given some sample code, should take a few hours to plug in and test. So when it takes someone weeks to add it in, because of strange timing issues or whatever, there is a problem. For instance, it took Bob a heckuva lot longer than a day to get Auto-232 working, and he says that it still doesn't work when there are tablebase accesses. Bob is no dummy; the problem lies elsewhere. I think it's much better to go to the root of the problem, and come up with a good solution, so that extensions and other modifications are easy later. When you find that you are beginning to strain the existing architecture, that's the time to look for a way to do it better, and provide backward compatibility for things that, for whatever reason, aren't going to be updated. Dave Gomboc
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