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Subject: Re: For R Hyatt : Crafty book creation bug when underpromotion encounte

Author: Andreas Guettinger

Date: 14:19:25 04/07/05

Go up one level in this thread


On April 07, 2005 at 16:59:33, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On April 07, 2005 at 13:40:23, Steven Edwards wrote:
>
>>On April 07, 2005 at 11:34:49, Marc Lacrosse wrote:
>>
>>>R Hyatt wrote :
>>>>that is illegal PGN.  Unless the standard has changed, the last time I looked
>>>>promotions were indicated as dxc8=R, _not_ dxc8R
>>
>>>You are right, Robert!
>>
>>Indeed he is.
>>
>>>In PGN standard 1994.03.12 at "8.2.3.3: Basic SAN move construction", one can
>>>read : "Pawn promotions are denoted by the equal sign "=" immediately following
>>>the destination square with a promoted piece letter (indicating one of knight,
>>>bishop, rook, or queen) immediately following the equal sign. "
>>
>>This is really a SAN issue and not (directly) a PGN issue.  I do recall a lot of
>>discussion on this and several alternatives, plus the regular voting.
>>
>>One alternative that I liked was to use a solidus (forward slash "/") as the
>>prefix character to the promoted piece, in part because it had a long history of
>>use from EDN.  But it was rejected.
>>
>>Another idea was to use a pair of parentheses around the promoted piece as this
>>also had some in print heritage.  It was rejected in part because some thought
>>it expanded the SAN string unnecessarily.
>>
>>Then there was the alternative of not having any special indication at all.  But
>>this was disliked because PGN, with the goal of being easily readable by humans,
>>was thought by some to require a special indication that could be quickly
>>located with a fast text editor search.
>>
>>>But maybe you should consider accepting the faulty syntax without the "=" sign,
>>>because :
>>>- it's the way Chessbase exports games to PGN (...sighing...)
>>
>>They should fix this; it would take at most a minute or two of coding.
>>
>>>- it is not easy to correct this "by hand"
>>
>>Nowadays I suspect that very little PGN movetext is entered by hand; most comes
>>from the output of mouse/GUI enabled programs.
>>
>>>- other engines (Yace, Pharaon, ...) seem to accept the "relaxed" syntax
>>
>>So does Symbolic's toolkit PGN reader.  (Many other typical deviations are also
>>processed correctly.)  But this also slows down the reader, and that's not a
>>good idea if you're frequently importing large amounts of PGN data.  Crafty's
>>PGN reader is quite fast, certainly faster than Symbolic's, in part because it
>>doesn't try too many attempts at correction.  Would you really want to slow it
>>down?
>
>
>Crafty already handles some non-PGN compliant things.  for example zero-zero for
>castling rather than oh-oh.  or 1.e4 rather than 1. e4 (missing space).
>
>You would think that software vendors could get this right, but then ChessBase
>has modified the PGN standard anyway with their new annotation tags and crap, so
>they will probably never plan on being 100% compatible with others...
>
>I'll try to fix this, but it is a real pain to waste my time fixing things that
>are caused by someone else's stupidity.  :)

Well, that is the Micro*oft way. Make a bug a standard.

regards
Andy



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