Hi all,

At long last, a release of Jess 6.0a1 is available at the usual place:

  http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov/jess/download.html

At this point, this should really be called a pre-alpha version, as it
isn't hugely different from the 5.0 line. The biggest difference is
the way fact-id's are handled. First of all, the numeric fact-id of a
fact does not change when you call (modify). Secondly, the RU.FACT_ID
type has disappeared altogether. The thing you get back when you bind
a pattern to a variable

 ?x <- (some-fact)

is an RU.FACT - i.e., the fact itself. You no longer have to call
Rete.findFactById to get the actual fact object. But the fact-id is no
longer an integer, and anyone who has written code treating it as such
(especially the folks whose questions instigated this line of
development) will need to modify their approach. I would imagine that
virtually everyone who was treating fact-id's explicitly as integers
was using them as an argument to findFactById, so the necessary
modifications should be straightforward.

The manual discusses the treatment of fact-id's much more than in the
past, and anyone who does anything more with them than the standard
bind and modify or retract should read this new text; see sections
2.8.1.2, 8.51, and 4.2.1.4 for the new material.

Change-log entries:

 Fact-id's are now simply references to Fact objects. Supplied fact-id
 function to create a fact-id value from an integer.  Many memory-usage
 reductions; no more extra Vectors in Rete network classes. Several
 code-shrinking refactorizations. Rete class no longer delivers events
 to listeners registered by a handler for the same event (thanks Alex
 Karasulu.) Fact-ids no longer change on modify. (batch) now works on a
 .clp files in a .jar file from an applet (thanks Javier Torres).

This release also includes the bug fixes in Jess 5.1:

 Bug fix release. Fixed two bugs in backwards chaining (thanks Ashraf
 Afifi.) Also, a regression repaired: pattern bindings couldn't be
 matched as they could in Jess 4, and now they can again.  


Have fun and don't be shy about sending along feedback.

One more note: I'm going on vacation all next week without Internet
access.

---------------------------------------------------------
Ernest Friedman-Hill  
Distributed Systems Research        Phone: (925) 294-2154
Sandia National Labs                FAX:   (925) 294-2234
Org. 8920, MS 9012                  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PO Box 969                  http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov
Livermore, CA 94550
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