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Subject: Re: General comments

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 08:00:23 06/10/04

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On June 10, 2004 at 04:33:21, Tord Romstad wrote:

>On June 09, 2004 at 16:19:10, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>Parsing SAN is _not_ hard.
>
>Perhaps not extremely hard, but still an unnecessary complication, IMHO.
>A format like "g1f3" or "Ng1f3" is closer to the internal representation
>of moves in almost all chess-related programs.  I find it hard to believe
>that there is a big number of programs which actually stores only the
>type of piece and the destination square, and adds more information only
>when it's necessary to avoid ambiguity.
>
>By using SAN, you make life more difficult for the programs which produce
>the files as well as for programs which read the files.  The programs which
>produce the files are forced to convert it's internal from-to representation
>of moves to SAN, and the programs which read the files have to reverse the
>process.  This seems really silly to me.

Notice that I said "I like and prefer SAN myself".

However I proposed that if we do a new standard, we pick _one_ move
representation and stick with it, and provide conversion utilities to convert it
to other representations (including san).




>
>SAN is only a good idea when the information is presented to the user.
>It has no place in file formats which are not designed to be read by
>humans, nor in engine communication protocols.


I don't disagree, except that there are always going to be humans that insist on
reading the raw data..



>
>>There is public code to do that in the epd kit as well as inside Crafty
>>itself.
>
>I am not sure what the "epd kit" is, but if you are referring to the
>epd*.c and epd*.h files by Steven J. Edwards which are included in the
>Crafty source code, they are unusable to the majority of chess programmers
>because of their gigantic size.  The epd*.* files alone are bigger than
>the complete source code of my engine, despite the fact that my code has
>grown very bloated.


What does their "size" have to do with being usable?  They don't add megabytes
to the executable...

Ever looked at the _size_ of the shared C libraries you are including without
knowing???  Hint:  They _are_ megabytes in size.




>
>Tord



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