I think Joe Kopena wrote: > > Dr. Friedman-Hill, I thought I'd ask this to the list instead of > directly as others might be interested: > > I'm curious if you have plans to improve Jess' query mechanism, > particuarly regarding the retrieval of facts? Maybe such changes have > been made in the latest versions, but I didn't get that impression. >
No, it's the same. Enhancing the query interrface has come up on this list before. I think someone actually posted some Userfunctions for working with queries, once; I may have dropped the ball in not posting them to the "User Contributions" page. Anyway, this enhancement is on the list of things to do -- it's just not at the top yet. Priority is related to the number of people asking for a feature, however, so interested parties should speak up... > Since the retrieval of facts in query results is mostly based on the > position of the fact in the query (indexing by number), I'm concerned > about their robustness. If I change a query in a library to add more > conditions or improve its efficiency, I might be able to change my code, > but other users of the library might have some difficulty detecting and > correcting the problem. This is a good point that I had not considered. > Is there a fundamental property of the query > mechanism/implementation that would make it difficult to return a list > of variable/binding pairs instead of the facts which matched the > pattern? No, not at all. The Iterator that got returned could be, for instance, a "smart iterator" that bundled up the results from each token. Let's talk about this for a future release. > If that's infeasible, would it be difficult to provide a mechanism to > label facts and index that way instead of numerically? That's an interesting idea, too. --------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send the words 'unsubscribe jess-users [EMAIL PROTECTED]' in the BODY of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED], NOT to the list (use your own address!) List problems? Notify [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
