Hello Ernest. My apologies for sending this to the list; mail directly
to you is bouncing with a 'user unknown' message. Perhaps we're having
'sendmail' troubles...
I'm seriously considering building a Common Lisp implementation of
CLIPS, and including some of the more interesting features of Jess
(eg. object pattern matching). My motivation is the apparent dearth of
general-purpose expert system development tools freely-available to
the Lisp community. I've done a significant amount of research here;
the only useful platform I found was LOOM, and until recently this
product was only available via a bloody permission-gathering
process. The lack of such tools cost me eight months of prototyping
work, and I don't want others to undergo the same frustrations.
[ FYI, LOOM is a hybrid OO modeling and inference engine implemented
in Common Lisp. LOOM 3.0 appears quite powerful, but sometimes all one
needs is a straight-forward rule-based system to get the job done. ]
My suspicion right now is that most of the porting effort would rest
in the Rete implementation; Lisp's wonderful macro facility will
likely obviate the need for most (all?) of the parsing requirements
for CLIPS constructs ('defrule', 'deffacts', etc.).
If you please I could use some information, such as 1) paper(s) read
to familiarize yourself with Rete and its implementation; 2) your
approach to Jess -- what pieces did you first build in order to
experiment with, and get a feel for, performance, interfaces, etc?; 3)
would you object to one or more Jess features appearing in my
port?. Things of this nature would be very helpful. Also, I would like
to GPL the resulting product; are you aware of any licensing issues
that might prohibit this?
I'd appreciate your thoughts on this. Thanks much.
Regards,
--
-------------------------------------------------------------
David E. Young
Fujitsu Network Communications "The fact that ... we still
([EMAIL PROTECTED]) live well cannot ease the pain of
feeling that we no longer live nobly."
-- John Updike
"Programming should be fun,
programs should be beautiful"
-- P. Graham
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