Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Apr 21, 2019 03:50 PM UTC:
Note that there is not really any need for pieces of opposing armies to have different ID
Actually, you can't count on that. A pawn may promote to any piece from either army.
XBoard I finally adopted the solution of dressed letters
Yup. I've already added support for this. You made a good case why this was logical for shogi variants with lots of pieces.
The problem with multi-letter ID is that they do not work in FEN when mixed with single letter. (And even if not mixed, it leads to FENs that are unreadable for humans).
I use an underscore as a prefix to force recognition of two-letter notations. It is not required if the first letter of the two-letter code does not represent a valid piece on its own, although you can use it anyway. The underscore is never displayed to the user.
As for human readability, I don't really understand this concern. They're not readable already. Can you look at a chess FEN and visualize the board (like which pieces are on the same ranks or diagonals?) I certainly can't. To me FEN is just a dense encoding for computer interpretation. In ChessV, you can just paste an FEN into a dialog and it will load it.
Actually, you can't count on that. A pawn may promote to any piece from either army.
Yup. I've already added support for this. You made a good case why this was logical for shogi variants with lots of pieces.
I use an underscore as a prefix to force recognition of two-letter notations. It is not required if the first letter of the two-letter code does not represent a valid piece on its own, although you can use it anyway. The underscore is never displayed to the user.
As for human readability, I don't really understand this concern. They're not readable already. Can you look at a chess FEN and visualize the board (like which pieces are on the same ranks or diagonals?) I certainly can't. To me FEN is just a dense encoding for computer interpretation. In ChessV, you can just paste an FEN into a dialog and it will load it.