Check out Grant Acedrex, our featured variant for April, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Oct 10, 2020 01:08 PM UTC:

The highest numbered placeholder should not exceed the number of different placeholders that you use. So, for example, if you use #4 as a placeholder, you should also include #3, #2, and #1.

I have just been waging a battle with this rule. This really is an extremely troublesome property of GAME code; is it really necessary to treat functions so sloppily? I understand that you somehow have to know how many arguments a function call has to delete from the stack. But why does it care if the earlier arguments are actually used to compute the function result? It should be able to just ignore them.

I have an application where I want to make it possible for a user to supply a function that could veto a normally valid pseudo-legal move generated by the library code, e.g. because it lands outside a confinement zone as in Xiangqi, or captures a piece type it should not be able to capture (e.g. the Jianggi Cannon x Cannon ban). To this end the library code has to call that function from some appropriate place, and it passes all the available information about the move to it, because there is no telling what kind of conditions the variant imposes. So it passes origin, destination, optional locust-capture square all to the function. But in individual cases the decision might require one some of the items (e.g. just the destination). It is really inconvenient having to include dummy operations on all the unused arguments. It completely mystifies a function that a user of the library would have to supply (and is bad for efficiency). Currently I work around it by writing something like

def BadZone cond 1 fn Edge #1 join #0 join #2 join #3 #4;

where the entire join club is just there to produce a dummy result that is never used (but cannot even be parenthesized to suppress its evaluation, as then the trick doesn't work anymore).

 


Edit Form

Comment on the page Game Courier Developer's Guide

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.