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Haru's Diagram doesn't implement this game by change of piece type.

I know that already. The alternative you were proposing is what does that.

At least the concept of type change on arrival on each square would cause a more intellegible presentation of the moves (which would become the usual leaps and rides, rather than detour trajectories that stray over the board edge).

That is true. It is much less obfuscated than using a long string of characters for each piece.

The disadvantage in this case would be that it involves so many different types.

I think you are mainly turned off on this conceptual interpretation of the rules by that I happened to call these 'types'. But it is really not different from what you describe, that the same piece acquires a different set of moves when it lands on a square.

Both would work, but the code for each would be very different. For what you are suggesting, you would have to multiply the piece definitions and implement a complex mechanism for changing from one piece type to another. Whereas my Game Courier code has a single definition for each piece, and it simply checks whether movement in a particular direction is allowed from a space before evaluating the rest of the function for how a piece moves.

but the problem with Smess is that you still would need a quite long list to describe how, say, a Numskull could move on all the different squares.

This underscores my original point. You were criticizing the way it has been programmed here as "heavy abuse of XBetza notation." In response to this, I pointed out that both this solution and the one you were proposing in its place were both kludges. While your proposal would be easier to read and use shorter XBetza codes, its kludgy approach to the game would still expand the required code, and it would not really be much of an improvement over what we already have. It's not that there is a problem with Smess. It is that the XBetza code approach to coding games focuses on describing the powers of pieces while neglecting other details that could be significant in a game, such as space attributes. While this one-sided approach works for many popular Chess variants, it will not work for a game like Smess without employing a kludge that somehow shifts information about the board into the piece definitions. Given this, I can accept a kludgy solution, but I'm not inclined to think that one kludgy solution is inherently superior to the other.