General question about Python design goals

[Christoph Zwerschke]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
>>>Christoph Zwerschke wrote:
>>Using linear arrays to represent chess boards is pretty common in
>>computer chess. Often, the array is made larger than 64 elements to make
>>sure moves do not go off the board but hit unbeatable pseudo pieces
>>standing around the borders. But in principle, linear arrays of that
>>kind are used, and for good reasons.
> 
> really?  a quick literature search only found clever stuff like bitboards,
> pregenerated move tables, incremental hash algorithms, etc.  the kind
> of stuff you'd expect from a problem domain like chess.

I don't know where you googled, but my sources do not say that bitboards 
are the *only* possible or reasonable representation:

http://chess.verhelst.org/1997/03/10/representations/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess#Board_representations
http://www.aihorizon.com/essays/chessai/boardrep.htm
http://www.oellermann.com/cftchess/notes/boardrep.html

Many programs still use the array representation. For example:
http://www.nothingisreal.com/cheops/
http://groups.msn.com/RudolfPosch/technicalprogamdescription1.msnw
Even GNU Chess did not use bitboards before version 5.
Here is an example in Python:
http://www.kolumbus.fi/jyrki.alakuijala/pychess.html

I did not say that there aren't more sophisticated and elaborate board 
representations than linear or two-dimensional arrays. But they are the 
simplest and most immediate and intuitive solution, and they have indeed 
been used for a long time in the 8-bit aera. Bitboards may be more 
performant, particularly if you are directly programming in assembler or 
C on a 64 bit machine, but not necessarily in Python. But they are also 
more difficult to handle. Which representation to use also depends on 
the algorithms you are using. You wouldn't write a performant chess 
engine in Python anyway. But assume you want to test a particular chess 
tree pruning algorithm (that does not depend on board representation) 
and write a prototype for that in Python, later making a performant 
implementation in assembler. You would not care so much about the 
effectivity of your board representation in the prototype, but rather 
about how easy it can be handled.

I think it is telling that you have to resort to a debate about 
bitboards vs. arrays in order to dismiss my simple use case for index() 
and count() as "unreal".

-- Christoph