Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 14:02:30 06/09/04
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On June 09, 2004 at 16:30:20, Anthony Cozzie wrote: >The e2e4 format is terrible because it is difficult to read for humans (uh, what >piece did he move?). This is not an issue. No one is going to be reading XML files. Or at least, that isn't the intent. The intent should be that it is easy for everyone to support a standard that meets our needs, including the shortcomings of existing standards. Even if people did read chess XML files, they would have to be a hell of a blindfold player to know the position after 50 moves, regardless of whether they know what piece was moved or not. So what is the point in adding complexity to the standard? >Admittedly parsing SAN is not hard (Zappa has a SAN parser) >but Long algebraic (Nf3xe5) is easier for humans and computers both. Nf3xe5... Uh, what piece was captured? ;-) I like long algebraic also. When we talk about the difficulty of supporting SAN, we have to consider relative difficulty. No, it is not difficult to support SAN, but compared to coordinate notation, it _is_ difficult. Any kid a week into his first high school programming class could support coordinate notation. Not a chance for supporting SAN. That would be a semester long (or year long?) project :-) By the way, did you write your own SAN parser, or did you borrow code? If you wrote your own, does it _really_ support SAN? i.e., would your program read moves like Lxf7? I don't know if that is really in the SAN standard or not, but I've seen people from other countries post PGN containing moves like that. With coordinate notation, there are no such problems with internationalization. SAN and long algebraic both have that issue to deal with. To me, that seems like something the GUI or conversion tool should deal with, not something an engine programmer should worry about.
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