Two Contributions to the User's Program Library Europe (UPLE)

[Ángel Martin]

Thanks guys, with these reinforcements I believe we've now got a workable translation done. It still has some idiosyncrasies but mostly due to the kind of description used , very much into the implementation details and taking quite a lot for granted. As for why abbreviating short words using equally long or even longer expressions, well I'm afraid scholars are at fault... the attraction of Latin and old class is strong!

The good news is it's working almost as advertised, although with some quirks that I'm trying to iron out. The program flow differs from the description in a couple of areas, which are those where the results look strange. Needless to say it won't win the prize for speed and finesse but the fact that it is capable of playing a game of Chess is nothing short of wonderful for that machine. It's amazing that the program was buried during over 40 years without much mention to it at all (surely the local flavor restricted distribution, but still...), thankfully Martin dug it up from those sands of time.

I've written a couple of routines to do conversion between the field numbers used by the program (to identify the squares on the board) and a coordinate convention, more usual and easier to use. Also I have reused a handy MCODE routine to input the white moves using the coordinate convention - ensuring that only proper values are entered (E2-E4, etc.) The final version is almost ready, will make it available ASAP.

Best,
ÁM