Author: Steven Edwards
Date: 12:29:48 08/02/04
Go up one level in this thread
On July 31, 2004 at 19:10:52, Russell Reagan wrote:
>On July 30, 2004 at 14:42:23, Steven Edwards wrote:
>
>>Also, it uses coordinate move notation instead of SAN,
>>and this seems like a ten year step backward.
>
>Do you also use a shotgun to kill flies? I am very surprised to see you saying
>this, being the creator of data standards that you are. SAN is major overkill
>for use in a communication protocol. Coordinate notation is a much better
>choice. It is trivial to support, while SAN is definitely not. Any kid in a
>junior high introduction to programming class could support converting
>coordinate notation to an internal representation and vice versa. Adding the
>same support for SAN will require either an awful piece of error-prone code, or
>writing a full blown chess engine. Either way, compared to coordinate notation,
>it will be much more error prone and much more time consuming.
SAN is trivial to support; there has been plenty of public domain SAN utility
software source for a long time. At some point every modern chess engine has to
both emit and parse SAN; why not use it for interprogram communication as well?
When I'm debugging with an interface log, I want to see 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 and not
e2e4 c7c5 g1f3. Human processing time is more valuable than machine time.
Not to start a flamefest, but your reasoning is specious. After all if "e2e4"
is good, maybe "5254" is better. Or even further, outputting the move in octal
or hexadecimal.
>Am I missing some redeeming quality that would justify using SAN instead of
>coordinate notation for a communication protocol? Please don't say readability,
>because that simply isn't an advantage here. If you're reading a chess book, SAN
>is more readable. Not so in a communication protocol where A) the moves are
>crammed in the middle of all kinds of other unrelated information, and B) the
>only time you will be reading the communications is when there is a problem, in
>which case you will usually be searching for a known string ("Why isn't the GUI
>accepting my engine playing e2e4?") Using SAN doesn't make this any easier: grep
>-C 5 'e2e4'
Readability is important independent of context. Again, my time is more
important than the machine's time.
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