Home * Programming * Languages

Chess programming is dominated by the C and C++ languages. The strongest engine in a non-C language is currently Booot written by Alex Morozov in Delphi. Critter was also originally written in Delphi, but was rewritten in C++ after running into too many 64-bit bugs in the Delphi compiler. The next strongest non-Delphi, non-C program is CuckooChess written in Java.

Classical Languages

Compiled and interpreted languages.

• Ada
• Algol
• Assembly
• Basic
• C
• C#
• Cilk
• C++
• D
• Delphi
• Forth
• Fortran
• Go (Programming Language)
• Haskell
• Java
• Julia
• Lisp
• Modula-2
• Nim (Programming Language)
• OCaml
• OpenCL
• Pascal
• PL/I
• Prolog
• Python
• Ruby
• Rust
• Scheme
• Simula

Scripting Languages

• Scripting languages from Wikipedia
• The pawn language from CompuPhase
• JavaScript
• Perl
• Tcl/Tk

Chess Languages

• CHE ¹
• Chess-Lisp for Steven Edwards' program Symbolic
• Chess Query Language
• MACH ²

Game Languages

• Casanova
• Game Description Language
• Zillions Rules Language

Publications

1950 ...

• Nathaniel Rochester (1953). Symbolic programming. Transactions of the I.R.E. Professional Group on Electronic Computers, Vol. 2, No. 4
• Noam Chomsky (1956). Three models for the Description of Language. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 2, pdf

1960 ...

• Christopher Strachey, Maurice Wilkes (1961). Some Proposals for Improving the Efficiency of ALGOL 60. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 4, No. 11
• V. I. Sobel'man, Mikhail R. Shura-Bura (1962). Realization of recursive procedures in the language of AlGOL-60. (Реализация Рекурсивных Процедур В Языке Алгол-60) Zhurnal Vychislitel'noi Matematiki i Matematicheskoi Fiziki, Vol. 2, No. 2
• Noam Chomsky, Marcel P. Schützenberger (1963). The Algebraic Theory of Context Free Languages. in P. Braffort, D. Hirschberg, Computer Programming and Formal Languages. Amsterdam: North Holland
• Christopher Strachey (1967, 2000). Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages. Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, Vol. 13: 11–49
• Edsger Dijkstra (1968). Go To Statement Considered Harmful. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 3, pdf ^{3 4}
• Bertram Vivian Bowden (1969). The Language of Computers. Literature: Reports hosted by Atlas Computer Laboratory

1970 ...

• Dana Scott, Christopher Strachey (1971). Toward an Mathematical Semantics for Computer Languages. pdf
• William A. Wulf (1971). Programming Without the GOTO. IFIP, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, August 1971 » goto
• William A. Wulf, et al. (1971). Reflections on a Systems Programming Language. Proceedings of the SIGPLAN Symposium on System Implementation Languages, Purdue University, October 1971
• William A. Wulf (1972). A Case Against the GOTO. Proceedings of the ACM National Conference, Boston, August 1972 » goto
• William A. Wulf, Mary Shaw (1973). Global Variables Considered Harmful. SIGPLAN Notices Vol. 8, No. 2, February 1973
• Mike Clarke (1973). Some Ideas for a Chess Compiler. Artificial and Human Thinking, reprinted 1988 in Computer Chess Compendium
• Donald Knuth (1974). Structured Programming with go to Statements. ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 6, No. 4, pdf » goto
• Donald Michie (1976). AL1: a package for generating strategies from tables. ACM SIGART Bulletin, Issue 59

1980 ...

• William A. Wulf, Mary Shaw, Paul N. Hilfinger, Lawrence Flon (1980). Fundamental Structures of Computer Science. Addison-Wesley, amazon.com
• Michael George (1988). MACH: A Master Advisor for CHess. M.Sc. thesis, University of Alberta

1990 ...

• Gilad Bracha, Gary Lindstrom (1992). Modularity meets inheritance. ICCL 1992, CiteSeerX
• Henri Bal, Dick Grune (1994). Programming Language Essentials. Addison-Wesley
• Chrilly Donninger (1996). CHE: A Graphical Language for Expressing Chess Knowledge. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 4
• Matthew Huntbach (1998). Aldwych: A General Purpose Concurrent Language. Department of Computer Science. Queen Mary and Westfield College, pdf
• Andrew Appel (1998). Modern Compiler Implementation in ML. Cambridge University Press ⁵
• Liwu Li (1999). Object-Oriented Essential Modeling. APSEC 1999

2000 ...

• John Romein, Henri Bal, Dick Grune (2000). The Multigame Reference Manual. Vrije Universiteit, pdf
• John Romein (2001). Multigame - An Environment for Distributed Game-Tree Search. Ph.D. thesis, Vrije Universiteit, supervisor Henri Bal, pdf
• Jónheiður Ísleifsdóttir (2007). GTQL: A Query Language for Game Trees. M.Sc. thesis, Reykjavík University, pdf
• Yngvi Björnsson, Jónheiður Ísleifsdóttir (2007). GTQL: A Query Language for Game Trees. CGW 2007
• Jónheiður Ísleifsdóttir, Yngvi Björnsson. (2008). GTQ: A Language and Tool for Game-Tree Analysis. CG 2008, pdf

2010 ...

• Giuseppe Maggiore, Alvise Spanò, Renzo Orsini, Giulia Costantini, Michele Bugliesi, Mohamed Abbadi (2011). Designing Casanova: A Language for Games. Advances in Computer Games 13 ⁶
• Mohamed Abbadi, Francesco Di Giacomo, Giuseppe Maggiore, Aske Plaat, Renzo Orsini, Pieter Spronck (2013). Resources, Entities, Actions. A generalized design pattern for RTS games and its language extension in Casanova. CG 2013, pdf
• Ward Douglas Maurer (2013). A Programming Language without Keywords. Computer and Information Science, Vol. 6, No. 1

2020 ...

• Manuel Cristóbal López-Michelone, Jorge Luis Ortega-Arjona (2020). A description language for chess. ICGA Journal, Vol. 42, No. 1

Forum Posts

• Engines written in which programming language? by Andreas Herrmann, Winboard Forum, June 01, 2009
• Programming language features for computer chess by Fabien Letouzey, CCC, January 27, 2011
• How beautiful is your code? by Julien Marcel, CCC, January 15, 2013
• [OT] LOC counting tool by Martin Sedlak, CCC, May 02, 2015 ⁷

External Links

General

• Programming language theory from Wikipedia
• Formal language from Wikipedia
• History Of Programming Languages HOPL
• Chomsky hierarchy from Wikipedia
• Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem from Wikipedia
• Wikipedia: List of programming languages by category
• Computer Programming from Wikibooks

Computer Programming/Hello world

Miscellaneous

• Compiler Description Language
• Flux Home
• GPU-Programming from AMD Developer Central
• Interface Description Language
• Unified Modeling Language
• Bjarne Stroustrup: The 5 Programming Languages You Need to Know, YouTube Video

Watch on YouTube

References