rob@srchtec.uucp (Rob Andes) (07/04/90)
After spending a great deal of time in the Lisp world doing AI, the time has come to produce the prototype within a fast, portable, maintainable (e.g., C++) language. As you could well imagine, there are some tasks easily accomplished in Lisp, some in iterative langugages like C, and vice versa. To the point(s): We are using Ultrix with ATT 2.0 C++. Within this domain, we're producing a multi-module AI system. This system uses shared memory, multi-processors (which implies multi-CODERS!), and has the need for speed. There are a few specific questions that I would like to pose to the C++ netters. In particular, how does one design an object hierarchy to support dynamic reading and writing of object instantiations to files. For example, I'm at a point in the run that is interesting. I'd like to save the current objects, their current values and the pointer structure associated with the current image. This needs to be general enough (and clever) enough, to determine what type of object (Lisp is easy here), the values, inheritance, etc., etc., and store it in a file for later loading. Second, how would one write an "eval" object? (I know some folks are giggling right now,because eval IS the interpretive part...). We have the need to store knowledge in objectsAND data, so the flexibility is paramount. I've accessed and reviewed the NIH C++ libraries, but there is a great deal of overhead in these libraries. Quite frankly, it's confusing without the (forthcoming) book. The concerns I've aired seem like tasks that would have already been confronted N times by others. I sure would appreciate a pointer in the C++ domain for this type of thing. Replys can be sent e-mail and I'll condense and repost. Prethanks for the help.