Saturday, February 22, 2003

Use the right Rule Tool. Ted's looking at drools.  I say, cool!  Rules are excellent.  I respect the work that Bob's done on drools, but XML syntax?  Youch!  It's OK for machine generation but it ain't a human language...Take a look at Ted's example, then see this: (deftemplate person (slot name)) (deftemplate hasSister (slot person)(slot sister)) (defrule has-sister ?f0 <- (person (name ?name)) ?f1 <- (hasSister (name ?name)(sister ?sister) => (printout t "Found sisters") ) The "prolog-like" language is actually significantly more LISP-like -- it came out of NASA and is called CLIPS.  Jess is a very cool (and fast) adaptation of it to the Java platform.  I highly suggest you check it out (as I've stated in previous blog entries). The point is, CLIPS is pretty good at declaring these kinds of rules.  Its syntax has stood the test of time.  It's not perfect (Jess makes some extensions that are good, and more should be there), but once you get into "rule think" it's hard to stop...I can't. I spent a chunk of the last week thinking about this stuff, while I was on planes.  Planes are good for thinking. 6:45:57 PM