How do i shorten the code in Pascal if I have one part repeating in multiple if functions?

Question

i started learning Pascal on my own and i want to create a program where i will calcualte the number of possible moves for a horse to make in 2 moves if i know it's starting possition. So i know how to do it, first i calcualte if it's possible to move on all 8 sides (2 up and 1 left, 2 up and one right, 2 left and one up...) and if it is possible then i do it again for the second move, but then i would have the same code i used to calculate the possible moves the first time repeating for 8 times. Sorry if it's a dumb question, if you can give me some tutorial on this matter, i just started learning, i don't even know if it's possible to do this.

Answer 1

You can create a Function for your calculation. It could return the number of possible moves from a given location.

Something like this:

Function calcMoves(pos : Position) : integer
Begin
    ...logic...
    calcMoves := theNumberOfMovesThatAreLegalFromPos
End

Sorry if the syntax is off, it's been a while since I did stuff in Pascal. However, the idea is that you can now reuse the calculation. What might be even better is to have a function that calculates not only the number of allowed moves, but also the position. You will need to return some kind of Array or collection. This way you could call the function once with the starting position as argument and then iterate through all possible positions after that move, using the end position of the first move as start position for the second move. That's what I would do, but I really cannot remember how collections were working in Pascal.