Hi Ernest.
Since I'm apparently the guilty party responsible for the code in
question, I can confirm your recollection of events concerning
Multifunctions.
If I recall correctly, the equals method was not available at the time
(I think I may have mentioned this to you in other correspondence) so I
made what is essentially a hack. Appending the data type made it easy
to differentiate objects that had equivalent string representations from
toString().
Win Carus
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>From: Ernest Friedman-Hill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Message-Id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Re: JESS: comparison operations on external addresses
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Date: Sun, 14 Feb 1999 19:30:52 -0800 (PST)
>In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> from "Bob Orchard" at Feb
13, 99 07:55:19 pm
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>
>Hi Folks,
>
>One of my many failings is that I have a tendency to feel squeamish
>about making changes to user-contributed code - it is, in my way of
>thinking, an example of "looking a gift horse in the mouth." That
>said, it should be obvious from the comments in Multifunctions.java
>that much of the code in that file was a gift - a rather old one, at
>that: it was first included in Jess 3.1.
>
>Looking now at the functions for subsetp, union$, intersection$, and
>complement$, I'm at a loss to explain the choice of algorithm. Jess
>has changed a lot since then, and perhaps at the time these were
>written, converting to strings and comparing the strings was the only
>way to accomplish the task, but at the present time, the
>Value.equals() method would serve much better. Note that at the time
>of Jess 3.1, EXTERNAL_ADDRESS values may not yet have ever been used
>by anyone, although the constant was defined.
>
>I'll delay 5,0a3 by another day and rewrite these questionable
>functions before the releae. Thanks for pointing these out.
>
>I think Bob Orchard wrote:
>>
>> Take a look at the code in MultiFinctions.java and you'll see that to
>> do the subsetp test the Values of the list are converted to strings
>> with ToString and the type is appended to this string. These strings
>> are used to compare and determine 'equality'. This probably works
>> most of the time but external addresses (i.e. Objects like
StringBuffer)
>> convert to string as "External-Address:objectname". This means that
>> for objects, all those of the same class are considered to be the
same.
>> I think this may be intentional (for performance perhaps),but I also
>> think it should be done as you say via equals.
>>
>> Bob.
>>
>> Bob Johnson wrote:
>>
>> > Fellow Jessians,
>> >
>> > I need to populate multislots with Java objects and subsequently
>> > perform multislot set comparisons. I was assuming that all
>> > comparisons on external addresses would be accomplished via the
Java
>> > "public boolean equals(Object obj)" method. The following
interaction
>> > seems to prove otherwise:
>> >
>> >
----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> > Jess, the Java Expert System Shell
>> > Jess Version 4.3 12/3/98
>> >
>> > Output appears in this window.
>> > Type your input in the one-line input box below.
>> > Jess> (defglobal ?*buffa* = (new java.lang.StringBuffer "a"))
>> > TRUE
>> > Jess> (defglobal ?*buffb* = (new java.lang.StringBuffer "b"))
>> > TRUE
>> > Jess> (subsetp (create$ ?*buffa*) (create$ ?*buffb*))
>> > TRUE
>> > Jess> (subsetp (create$ "a") (create$ "b"))
>> > FALSE
>> > Jess> (call ?*buffa* toString)
>> > "a"
>> > Jess> (call ?*buffb* toString)
>> > "b"
>> > Jess> (call ?*buffa* equals ?*buffb*)
>> > FALSE
>> > Jess>
>> >
----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> >
>> > Am I expecting something that I shouldn't or is this a bug?
>> >
>> > Regards,
>> >
>> > Bob
>> >
>> >
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>
>
>---------------------------------------------------------
>Ernest Friedman-Hill
>Distributed Systems Research Phone: (925) 294-2154
>Sandia National Labs FAX: (925) 294-2234
>Org. 8920, MS 9214 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>PO Box 969 http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov
>Livermore, CA 94550
>
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