Hi Earnest,
>Editorial comment: long ago, when I was first learning CLIPS, the
>precise nature of fact-ids was something that confused be greatly. You
>could sometime use integers as fact-ids, and fact-ids as integers, but
>sometimes not. None of the documentation explained any of the
>rules. Anyway, I suppose I should have learned from this experience
>and made Jess more sensible in theis regard, but I didn't. Maybe,
>perhaps, there doesn't even need to be the notion of a fact-id as a
>distinct type of value; maybe they should just uniformly be integers.
>Does anybody see anything wrong with that? I don't.
I've always thought of fact-id's as opaque objects. Sort of like magic
cookies. If you got one, you can hand it back into CLIPS/JESS and it
will understand it, but I should try. Although they are implemented as
integers, I believe there is a significant difference. After all, an
integer can be created by anyone, and assigned almost any value. They
represent a numeric value. Fact-id's cannot be created without
CLIPS/JESS method for asserting a fact. They can't have just any ol'
value, and they represent facts. Maybe I'm a purist, but I think that,
if anything, it should be a whole new class of its own. This would
allow the language type checking to ensure integers and fact-id's aren't
interchanged.
Oh well, that's my two-cents
Mike Fochtman
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