MUHRTH@DB0TUI11.BITNET (Thomas Muhr) (08/04/89)
Considering SmallTalk as a prototyping tool for a hypertext-alike application bound to run on 80286-PC's, I am currently trying on DigiTalk's ST-version. The application to come is of the highly interactive sort and SmallTalk seems to cover most of technical burdens which surround graphical user interfaces. But - I have the impression, that there won't even be a prototype with our reduced resources (RAM: 2 MB !-( ) after having taken a look at 'Smalltalk unusedMemory' before and after loading a toy application described in the handbook (SalesCom). The few classes and methods took about 200 KB of adress space! So these are my questions: Is the above programming environment of any serious use for prototyping and/or creation of a programm managing large text- and databases (I know this is a rather fuzzy description) ? Is the built-in prolog-engine of any use ? What literature is available which goes beyond the handbook (which is very good for starters like me!). Are there public-domain-libraries of useful code? Why does my system hang after installing the comm-classes/methods? (Screen starts flickering, the 'vacuum cleaner' seems to have a lot of work and after a while the system reports memory-depreviation). I hope there will be somebody out there who can give me some hint or comment on the described problems. Thank you very much in advance - Thomas ------- THOMAS MUHR, KNOWLEDGE BASED SYSTEMS DPT. OF TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY BERLIN PROJECT ATLAS - COMPUTER BASED QUALITATIVE RESEARCH FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES BITNET: MUHRTH@DB0TUI11 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry W. Kort) (08/06/89)
In article <378@DB0TUI11.BITNET> MUHRTH@DB0TUI11.BITNET (Thomas Muhr) asks some questions about DigiTalk Smalltalk V/Mac: > Is the built-in prolog-engine of any use ? We use the Prolog classes for a rule-based diagnostic expert system which analyzes fault and overload conditions in a color-animated smalltalk model of a local area network (LAN). The basic LAN model is coded in Smalltalk. The user can instruct various components of the model to misbehave in interesting ways. The expert system then has to diagnose the problem based on observed behavior of the model as reported by Lanalyzer measurements of collision events and statistical counts of packets and acknowledgements. We are using continuous-valued logic, so the diagnostic expert system forms an evolving opinion about the hypothetical fault conditions as confirmatory and exculpatory evidence trickles in over time. At the present time, there are only a few dozen rules, and the expert system is of modest scope. But it demonstrates the potential for integrated model-based and rule-based paradigms for simulation, inference, and diagnostic reasoning. --Barry Kort