Comments by FergusDuniho

4d games are rare enough that I wouldn't have bothered to add a database column.

Since I was adding code to the footer to indicate a board's dimensions, it seemed more appropriate than treating them as 3D games.

It will probably cause confusion for new authors.

I have added tooltips to the Edit Item form, and if there are other forms they should be added to, I can do that. I have also used parentheses to make it clearer what the dimensions of a board refer to. For 3D boards, a single pair of parentheses go around the files-by-ranks part, and levels goes on its left. For 4D boards, another pair of parentheses goes around the 3D board dimensions, and the 4th dimension goes on the left. The convention I'm following places increasing dimensions on the left, and it treats the number of ranks as the first dimension. This is because in the typical Chess variant, the board has two sides, and each player starts with all his pieces on one side. So, the distance between two sides would be the number of ranks. The second dimension, the number of files, is about how much space each side has to spread out its forces. Since we normally write files before ranks in algebraic notation, it makes sense to add higher dimensions to the left side. Also, this was the convention followed in some 3D games I looked at last night. And it's also sort of how Arabic numerals work. The leftmost digit in a numeral has a higher value than those to the right.

Extending the number of ranks and files to infinity does not also increase the axes of movement through individual spaces. This is a large 2D game, but it is not 3D or 4D. So, I have removed it from those categories.

I have now modified it to use the update_row function, which should fix things.

What I've done for now is provide an individual default for each parameter instead of giving them all an empty string as the default. I'll do some more work later.

7:44 am CST would be 13:44 UTC, and I got this for that time:

[23-Jan-2023 13:44:07 UTC] PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught PDOException: SQLSTATE[22007]: 
Invalid datetime format: 1366 Incorrect integer value: '' for column
`chessvariants`.`Item`.`BoardRows` at row 1 in /home/chessvariants/public_html/index/membersubmission2.php:385
Stack trace:
#0 /home/chessvariants/public_html/index/membersubmission2.php(385): PDOStatement->execute()
#1 {main}
  thrown in /home/chessvariants/public_html/index/membersubmission2.php on line 385

Instead of using replace, I should probably use insert if the row doesn't exist and update if it does, as I have already fixed this problem for the update_row function. Since BoardRows is not even a datetime field, this is a weird message, but the underlying problem is that replace is getting an empty string instead of whatever it is expecting.

I'm not sure if this is due to the server move, but member-submission of External Link pages doesn't seem to be working.

As a preliminary test, I made a link page to PyChess, and it worked. So, I have not been able to repeat the problem you encountered. If you have any further problem with it, let me know the time and details do that I can check the error log.

I'll look into it tomorrow.

The documentation was incorrect. You do not need the logic keyword.

With expressions enclosed in parentheses, it's even possible to construct variable names and create some very obfuscated code. For example:

set a.1 Adam;
set a.2 Abel;
set Abel.brother.1 Cain;
set Abel.brother.2 Seth;
echo #a.{- 5 4};
echo #{#{chr - ord b 1}.2}.b{rot}her.{!= brother keeper};

The output is:

Adam

Cain

Note that rot is just a bare string, and {rot} just gets replaced with rot during preprocessing.

I didn't get the same output as you. I got this:

Array
(
    [0] => w
    [1] => se
    [2] => s
    [3] => nw
    [4] => e
    [5] => n
)

Would it work to combine direction with where like this?

where c3 logic direction a1 c3

As long as your code is using logical directions that match the output of direction. If you have not setup logical directions, and your code only uses mathematical relations between spaces, then it will not work.

You may use braces where you don't need them, such as in set, if or elseif. You may do this for stylistic reasons or because you can't remember which commands normally work with expressions.

set c {join e 2};
if {== #c e1}:
  echo "Partridge";
elseif {== #c e2}:
  echo "Turtledoves";
elseif {== #c e3}:
  echo "French Hens";
endif;

This outputs Turtledoves.

Here's an example of including expressions between braces, first as a lone argument, then inside of a string.

set c e2;
echo {space e2} "{var c}-{join filename var c + rankname var c 2}";

Here's the output:

P e2-e4