Hi Folks, The next alpha release of Jess 6.0 is now available for download at http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov/jess/download.html . There are a number of bug fixes in this release, one major performance enhancement, and one major new feature. The performance enhancement has to do with multifield matching; it won't affect many users, but for those that it does affect, the change can be dramatic -- several orders of magnitude speed increases are possible. The new feature is the "or" conditional element, and more generally, arbitrary nesting of conditional elements on the LHS of a rule. There are still some kinks to work out of this, as described in the manual, but the basics are there and work well. As usual, feedback is encouraged. >From the change log: Defqueries can now backwards-chain to get results. run-until-halt now clears halt flag first. finally in (try) (thanks Thomas Barnekow). Many typos in manual fixed (thanks Michael Futtersack.) (or) and (and) CEs, and general nesting of CEs now operational (thanks to Mariusz Nowostawski and Jack Kerkhof for test cases,) although code still needs refactoring and (and) and (or) won't work correctly inside of (not). waitForActivations() could block even if activations were available; now fixed (thanks Thomas Barnekow). Added some "LISP compatibility functions:" progn, apply. Fixed off-by-one error in line-numbers in error reports. Vastly improved efficiency of multifield matching (thanks to Sebastian Varges for noticing a problem with the old implementation.) Deactivate activations earlier in the rule-firing process, to remove a bit of redundant processing (thanks David Bruce.) --------------------------------------------------------- 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] ---------------------------------------------------------------------
