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Subject: Re: C or C++ for Chess Programming?

Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto

Date: 11:57:59 08/16/00

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On August 16, 2000 at 14:38:04, Severi Salminen wrote:

>Are there any efficiency aspects involved? I'm asking this
>because I'm quite new to OOP and would like to start studying
>it only if it benefits chess programming somehow.

Considering the fact that chess programming often requires
squeezing the last bit of performance out of your program,
I'd say that a non-OOP program will certainly benefit
performancewise.

That said, if, by making your program OO, you make it
easier to debug and add new features, it may very well
be worth it.

From personal experience, my first encounter with game tree
search was a checkers program. I wrote it fully OO (in Object
Pascal). After some time improving it I finally ended up
ditching most of the OO design in favor of raw performance.

I'm going through the same process now with Sjeng, ditching
flexibility and readability in favor of speed, by switching
to global variables, using goto's etc.

Leen Ammeraal's Queen program is supposed to be written in
C++, and knowing Leen, probably very well so, but he still
hasn't released the sources to it...maybe an email to the
Free Software Foundation would help a bit, as he is
in direct violation of the GPL.

>I'll be using the free Borland C++ 5.5

I have yet to hear anything positive about this compiler
performancewise...there may be better Free alternatives
out there.

--
GCP



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