"Phil Garcia" PhilippGarcia@Home.com writes:
Thanks Anders for all the comments and questions.
From: "Anders Kierulf" anders@smartgo.com To: gtp@lists.lysator.liu.se Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2001 9:55 PM Subject: RE: [gtp] GTP Specification-Draft
Thanks to Phil for getting this written up, it's good place to start from. Below are various comments and suggestions, and lots of questions.
(1) Optional id
What's the purpose of these optional id numbers? As I understand it, the engine is simply echoing them, it can't base any of its decisions on these numbers. So how are they helping the controller program? How are these numbers used in GNU Go, and what would the protocol lose if these were removed from the standard?
I agree, these numbers seem to be useless in a requst/response type of protocol. Unless there is a really good reason for keeping them, I'm all for removing them. Existing GTP developers please speak up.
(2) Error messages
Page 5 states that the error message should return "not implemented". So it seems that this error message is standardized, but not others. I'd suggest we standardize a list of error messages, and make them single words, e.g. "not_implemented", "illegal_move", and "invalid_coordinate". Controllers may then be able to make smarter decisions depending on the error message returned.
Great idea! I suggested something similar, using error code numbers, but your suggestion is much better. I will add this to the GTP specification.
We could do what the existing internet protocols do (smtp, nntp, ...), and have both a 3-digit error code, followed by explanatory text.
dd