Actually I agree that XBetza has become too obfuscated, and that it has grown that way because of its use as move definition in the Interactive Diagram, where there was demand for pieces with ever more complex moves. But the bracket notation for describing multi-leg moves is much more intuitive, and hardly any less intuitive than the original Betza notation was for single-leg moves.
But it should be kept in mind that the complex, hard-to-understand descriptions in practice hardly ever occur. The overwhelming majority of variants never gets any further than symmetric slider-leaper compounds, which are dead simple. Personally I think it is much easier to read or write BN rather than "bishop-knight compound' all the time. It is certainly moer easy for a computer to understand than colloquial English, and is not beyond the understanding of most people. (While programming languages are.) The reason Betza's funny notation has become so popular is mainly that although it potentially can be complex, the cases needed in practice are quite simple.
BTW, the Play-Test Applet already contains a Betza-to-English converter, even though it is not always perfect yet.
Actually I agree that XBetza has become too obfuscated, and that it has grown that way because of its use as move definition in the Interactive Diagram, where there was demand for pieces with ever more complex moves. But the bracket notation for describing multi-leg moves is much more intuitive, and hardly any less intuitive than the original Betza notation was for single-leg moves.
But it should be kept in mind that the complex, hard-to-understand descriptions in practice hardly ever occur. The overwhelming majority of variants never gets any further than symmetric slider-leaper compounds, which are dead simple. Personally I think it is much easier to read or write BN rather than "bishop-knight compound' all the time. It is certainly moer easy for a computer to understand than colloquial English, and is not beyond the understanding of most people. (While programming languages are.) The reason Betza's funny notation has become so popular is mainly that although it potentially can be complex, the cases needed in practice are quite simple.
BTW, the Play-Test Applet already contains a Betza-to-English converter, even though it is not always perfect yet.