Greetings. I'd like to announce the release of LISA version 1.1, available
at http://sourceforge.net/projects/lisa/. The most significant new feature
in this release is support for dynamic rule definition; that is, it is now
possible to create new rules from the RHS of existing rules at runtime. This
feature has been tested to some extent but should still be considered
somewhat experimental. I've made it available in hopes that dynamic rule
definition will gain some exposure and draw suggestions and bug reports.
Please see the LISA reference guide for details on new features and
additions to the programming language.
In the "credits" department, many thanks go to Art Nuzzo for his suggestions
and assistance during development of the dynamic rule feature.
Oh, since I just uploaded the 1.1 to Sourceforge it might be a few minutes
before the files actually appear. If you can't find the release try again in
a bit.
Cheers,
--
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David E. Young
········@computer.org
http://lisa.sourceforge.net
"But all the world understands my language."
-- Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Aha, a new Lisp descendant of CLIPS. Software evolution is interesting.
CLIPS was originally a C knockoff by NASA (JSC, I think) of part of ART,
a Lisp expert-system shell produced by Inference Corp, which at the time
only ran on Lisp Machines and was being ported to Unix workstations.
NASA wanted to fly systems too small to support the Lisp runtime. CLIPS
originally contained just a forward-chaining rule engine for the ART
language. Much later, an object system was added. Curiously, Inference
decided it was necessary to move to C, and produced a C version of ART,
called ART-IM, which eventually evolved into ART*Enterprise. ART-IM was
initially based on the early public domain version of CLIPS, with
Inference's proprietary Rete speedups, and later an object system. On
the grounds that Lisp was no longer of interest to the Fortune 500 in
about 1992, Inference dropped the Lisp version of ART, which was quite a
cool piece of software, integrating forward- and open-world backward
chaining, objects and a little-used subsystem for hypothetical and
temporal reasoning called Viewpoints, and a nice development and UI
environment.
Jeff (who spent many years laboring over the rule engines and object
systems of these various products).
"David E. Young" <········@computer.org> wrote in message
·····························@typhoon.southeast.rr.com...
> Greetings. I'd like to announce the release of LISA version 1.1,
available
> at http://sourceforge.net/projects/lisa/.
In article <······················@typhoon.we.rr.com>, "Jeff Greif"
<······@spam-me-not.alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:
>Aha, a new Lisp descendant of CLIPS. Software evolution is interesting.
>CLIPS was originally a C knockoff by NASA (JSC, I think) of part of ART,
>a Lisp expert-system shell produced by Inference Corp, which at the time
>only ran on Lisp Machines and was being ported to Unix workstations.
>NASA wanted to fly systems too small to support the Lisp runtime. CLIPS
>originally contained just a forward-chaining rule engine for the ART
>language.
Was CLIPS a knock-off of part of ART, or did it originate as a C
implementation of OPS5 (which was written in Common Lisp)?
Sashank
In article <······························@129.59.212.53>,
·············@vanderbilt.edu (Sashank Varma) wrote:
>Was CLIPS a knock-off of part of ART, or did it originate as a C
>implementation of OPS5 (which was written in Common Lisp)?
Nevermind. I found the answer in one of the CLISP manuals, which
I quoted at the end of the message because it is rather long.
Sashank
"The origins of the C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS)
date back to 1984 at NASA�s Johnson Space Center. At this time, the
Artificial Intelligence Section (now the Software Technology Branch)
had developed over a dozen prototype expert systems applications using
state-of-the-art hardware and software. However, despite extensive
demonstrations of the potential of expert systems, few of these
applications were put into regular use. This failure to provide expert
systems technology within NASA�s operational computing constraints
could largely be traced to the use of LISP as the base language for
nearly all expert system software tools at that time. In particular,
three problems hindered the use of LISP based expert system tools
within NASA: the low availability of LISP on a wide variety of
conventional computers, the high cost of state-of-the-art LISP tools
and hardware, and the poor integration of LISP with other languages
(making embedded applications difficult).
"The Artificial Intelligence Section felt that the use of a
conventional language, such as C, would eliminate most of these
problems, and initially looked to the expert system tool vendors to
provide an expert system tool written using a conventional language.
Although a number of tool vendors started converting their tools to
run in C, the cost of each tool was still very high, most were
restricted to a small variety of computers, and the projected
availability times were discouraging. To meet all of its needs in a
timely and cost effective manner, it became evident that the
Artificial Intelligence Section would have to develop its own C based
expert system tool.
"The prototype version of CLIPS was developed in the spring of 1985 in
a little over two months. Particular attention was given to making the
tool compatible with expert systems under development at that time by
the Artificial Intelligence Section. Thus, the syntax of CLIPS was made
to very closely resemble the syntax of a subset of the ART expert
system tool developed by Inference Corporation. Although originally
modelled from ART, CLIPS was developed entirely without assistance from
Inference or access to the ART source code."
"Jeff Greif" <······@spam-me-not.alumni.princeton.edu> wrote in message
···························@typhoon.we.rr.com...
> Aha, a new Lisp descendant of CLIPS...
Hey, that's pretty cool Jeff. Would you mind if I put that "pre-history" on
LISA's web site? Properly attributed of course...
Cheers,
--
------------------------------------------
David E. Young
········@computer.org
http://lisa.sourceforge.net
"But all the world understands my language."
-- Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)