What exactly did you mean by "didn't work right"? What happens? Does it do anything at all?
In that case, you should make use of ask to spell out the optional moves and ask which one the player wants to make.
That is ugly. For a Chu-Shogi Lion there would typically be 8 moves for the second leg, next to the pass option, and the user would have to interpret all the square coordinates to see which of these he wants. We don't prefer that system of move entry for the main move, and it is also far inferior for the second move, unless perhaps when there is only choice between two options. (Shogi-promotion Yes/No comes to mind, although even that is probably better handled by the askpromote function showing the images.) We chose (with good reason) for a system that picks moves by clicking squares on the board, and we should stick to that for as long as it is a matter of selecting a square. Even the system as it works now, where the user has to select the piece that just made the first part of the move again for making the second part is much better. It would just be cool if he wouldn't have to re-select it. That would also make it much more obvious he still isn't done with the move. He could see that from the 'Previous Moves' in the entry block, of course, but his attention at this point would be at the board, so that is easy to miss.
This allows cond to be used in recursive functions.
OK, I see. To create the possibility for conditional evaluation, the evaluation that would normally take place is fooled into thinking it is just passing an array (which by default is not evaluated further). The cond operator then has to evaluate the operand it picks after the fact, and this is triggered by the operand being an array. But when the operand happened to be an array by itself, rather than due to explicit parenthesizing in the statement, it aso triggers this extra evaluation, which was neither wanted nor expected. At that point cond can no longer see where the parentheses came from.
This is really extremely confusing, and should be stressed in the manual entry about cond. There should be a strong warning that one should always pass the expressions for op2 and op3 as arrays (i.e. parenthesized) when one of those could evaluate to an array. Is there in fact any reason to not use parentheses around the alternatives? Why would you ever want to evaluate the expression that is to be discarded? I don't think I will ever use cond without parentheses again. That makes the code much easier to read as well.
What exactly did you mean by "didn't work right"? What happens? Does it do anything at all?
That is ugly. For a Chu-Shogi Lion there would typically be 8 moves for the second leg, next to the pass option, and the user would have to interpret all the square coordinates to see which of these he wants. We don't prefer that system of move entry for the main move, and it is also far inferior for the second move, unless perhaps when there is only choice between two options. (Shogi-promotion Yes/No comes to mind, although even that is probably better handled by the askpromote function showing the images.) We chose (with good reason) for a system that picks moves by clicking squares on the board, and we should stick to that for as long as it is a matter of selecting a square. Even the system as it works now, where the user has to select the piece that just made the first part of the move again for making the second part is much better. It would just be cool if he wouldn't have to re-select it. That would also make it much more obvious he still isn't done with the move. He could see that from the 'Previous Moves' in the entry block, of course, but his attention at this point would be at the board, so that is easy to miss.
OK, I see. To create the possibility for conditional evaluation, the evaluation that would normally take place is fooled into thinking it is just passing an array (which by default is not evaluated further). The cond operator then has to evaluate the operand it picks after the fact, and this is triggered by the operand being an array. But when the operand happened to be an array by itself, rather than due to explicit parenthesizing in the statement, it aso triggers this extra evaluation, which was neither wanted nor expected. At that point cond can no longer see where the parentheses came from.
This is really extremely confusing, and should be stressed in the manual entry about cond. There should be a strong warning that one should always pass the expressions for op2 and op3 as arrays (i.e. parenthesized) when one of those could evaluate to an array. Is there in fact any reason to not use parentheses around the alternatives? Why would you ever want to evaluate the expression that is to be discarded? I don't think I will ever use cond without parentheses again. That makes the code much easier to read as well.