How would I do this?

[Ian Kelly]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 9:16 PM, John Doe <h4ck3rpr0n3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> I;m working on making a chess program and I hit a wall. I have no idea how to get the position of the chess pieces. I have the chess board 1-8 and A-H for black as well as 1-8 and a-h for white. i just have to figure out how to declare those positions for the actual pieces so like the row of pawns for black would be B1-B8 as well as be able to replace the other coordinates with the piece when they move there like if I moved a black pawn from B1 to C1 B1 would be empty and then C1 would have it.
>
> I'm sorry if that's confusing but I can't seem to figure out how to do it... Any help is greatly appreciated and thank you in advance!

The usual way to do this would be to represent the board as an 8x8
list of lists, with each item of the inner lists representing one
space on the board and denoting its contents.  For example, you might
have board[1][4] = 'P', indicating that E2 (1, 4 in zero-based
row-column coordinates) holds a white pawn.