Couple of minor developments on the scorch front. First, I have a rough flowchart whipped up. There are likely flaws in this chart, but I wanted to quickly get my thoughts diagrammed out. PDF, or Graphviz/DOT.
Development two is more or less just a vague thought. Since the main goal here is correspondence chess, and nothing terribly intensive, efficiency probably isn't the highest priority. Some sense of modularity could be achieved, at the expense of efficiency, by writing the FEN handler in C (or whatever) and leaving the rest of the task to builtins and shell scripting. So, our FEN tool would only really need to be capable of a few things - parsing FEN, turning FEN into a human-readable representation of a board, parsing movetext in algebraic notation, and applying said movetext to FEN.
The FEN tool could then be useful for other things as well:
- Just displaying a board, given FEN
- Just manipulating FEN (FEN and movetext in, FEN out), without display
- Generating FEN from nothing (normal game start, 960)
…and the shell script would just handle the input, watching files, output side of things. This modularity would pave the way for a shell script to handle visually traversing PGN as well. This is all still a bit of a pipe dream, but at least I'm dreaming it out ahead of time…
I've thought a lot in the past about correspondence chess, and the current state of such. There are a number of online solutions, most of them not so great. Twitter-based ChessTweets is my current favorite solution (anyone who wants a fight, @brhfl) although the constant barrage of DMs from the system does get somewhat irritating. I use the somewhat clumsy XBoard with a variety of engines for the sake of analysis, but using it for correspondence is far from ideal. This task seems the perfect opportunity to demonstrate that less is more, and create a CLI interface which acts as a somewhat dumb client for displaying a board and interpreting moves. While I will probably never actually code this, I hope that perhaps I will some day, and I will call it scorch for Simple Correspondence Chess.
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