rather old Patch

[Simon Waters]

I have applied a patch from Lukas to the cvs head version of GNU
Chess.

Details in ChangeLog.

I made a minor change to avoid a compiler warning, I think you
were changing a constant point to unconstant strings, when you
wanted to change a pointer to constant strings, now I remember
why I hate pointer arithmetic......

I rejected the change to make the default hashtable size larger
- sorry Lukas people still do use very old PC's to play chess
against, I don't understand it ither.


Memory allocation in init.c. The hashtable change didn't fix
crashing on my machine, I think it may be the use of "atoi" on
hashsize that is the problem. 

We ought to use something that checks the numbers are valid for
the call to calloc. Again my lack of C experience is hurting. We
probably ought to use strtol in place of atoi, or better still
write our own little routine which we can pass upper and lower
bounds on valid values. I suspect the library code probably use
to enforce 2^32 but needs to be more relaxed these days, Lukas's
use of 64 architectures could explain why the fix works for him
and not me! Anyway I have another patch to apply that affects
cmd.c code, so probably I'll apply it soon.

book.h now has a list of valid places to look for the GNU Chess
opening book.

Stuart is the only one using the Novag Universal board - he best
check it still works okay as a whole load of problems with cmd.c
have been cleaned up since he last built it for Novag.

 Simon, about half way through his list of pending changes.

PS: Lukas I think I emailed your old email address?!