Author: David Blackman
Date: 05:48:43 06/23/99
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On June 22, 1999 at 12:02:59, Nisse Persson wrote: >Hi > >What would be the recomended programming language to write a chessprogram? > >Regrads > >Nisse Nearly everyone uses C or C++. I use C. But i wouldn't recommend them unless you really are good with these languages and like them. A few people use assembler, but i think assembler for the whole program is silly. A few small assembly routines in a mostly high level language program might make sense. Language features to look for: Speed. You can take a factor of 2 hit over good assembler, but anything worse is bad if you want to write a competitive program. Interpreted languages are right out. Low level bit operations. These can be very helpful if you want to try some of the smarter methods. Best if the language has some way to do bitwise AND, OR, XOR, shift, find-first-one, and count bits. Not many languages have all of these, so it is nice if the compiler allows inline assembler. Safety. Compile time type checking, and run-time array bounds checking are useful. (You might want an option to turn off run-time checking when you go into competition, but it's great when debugging.) C is really weak here, and C++ only offers partial solutions. Features like classes, garbage collection and so on are good in a programming language, but not really necessary for chess programs since the programs are small, there are no really elaborate data structures needed, and memory allocation can be done on the stack. The only really essential data structure is the array. Something at the level of C structs, or Pascal records is also useful. And maybe C bitfield structs. And finally you have to be comfortable with the language, and have a good reliable compiler available for your computer.
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