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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.


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