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Subject: Re: piece list possibilities

Author: Peter W. Gillgasch

Date: 17:11:02 07/11/98

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Netscape 4 sucks as well. Should switch to Cyberdog. I really hate this web
setup :) Just had to say that :)

On July 11, 1998 at 19:20:03, Roberto Waldteufel wrote:

>I have heard about all sorts of compiler optimization available in C compilers,
>but since I am used to Basic I have stuck with it. Until very recently I only
>had a 16-bit compiler for Basic to create DOS applications, but the
>manufacturers (PowerBasic Inc) have recently released two 32-bit Basic compilers
>for creating Windows programs with very similar syntax to the DOS versions. I
>ported my old code to the new compiler, and it's pretty fast now. The PowerBasic
>compiler also does some fancy optimisation stuff (eg register variables), but I
>have no idea how well it compares to C. It is certainly orders of magnitude
>faster than the Visual Basic Compiler, which is really only an interpretter
>anyway. Interestingly, they have stated there intention to develop versions of
>this compiler for other platforms such as linux and unix in the future, which
>would make it very portable.

But it would still be very specific (only one vendor).

> I mainly use the assembler for doing loops through
>bitboards, since then I can do everything in registers instead of RAM.

Assembly still is the best for chess programming. Ever was, ever will be.

>I do find it disheartening that everyone quotes code in C, because I have to
>struggle to make any sense of it.

C is assembly without the alignment optimizations and without the funky multiple
entry point optimizations and with the ABI induced stupid register  save/restore
orgies. For chess it is completely worthless, at least on non x86 architectures
(give me >= 16 registers or give me death ;) You could probably use Pascal or
Fortran on the Intel if you want to. Possibly Fortran is even best because you
will not suffer from C's aliasing assumptions.

> I can generally understand Pascal easily
>enough, because the syntax is very similar to Basic, and also to a large extent
>Fortran, although I haven't seen any Fortran code in decades now.
>
>BTW did you manage to find your old RexChess preprocessor code that you
>developped with Larry? You said yo would send it to me of you could find it.

Jesus Christ ! Just in case Don *really* said this, I want it too :)

-- Peter



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