kessler@cons.utah.edu (Robert R. Kessler) (04/20/89)
I forgot to mention in my previous announcement about FROBS, that we also have a package known as FROLIC, which is also available in the same directory on cs.utah.edu as pub/frolic.tar.Z (it will be placed there later today). On the one hand, FROLIC is simply a Prolog written in Common Lisp, which uses Lisp syntax, and provides access to the underlying Lisp. However, it also knows about FROBS. So, you can write Prolog statements which access/manipulate the FROBS data structures. The statements which access the FROBS structures permit the slots to be used in any order, which is a nice enhancement over the restrictions that Prolog places on its functor arguments. We are not particularily proud of the speed of FROLIC (on the order of a few thousand LIPS), but it does give the flexibility of writing backward-chaining style rules in FROBS (we had a project to compile FROLIC, but that was halted when the grad student that was doing the work got a "real" job and left). The addition of FROLIC, makes FROBS a fairly complete expert system shell. All it really needs is some fancy user interface tools, as well as development tools, and it would be complete. Same distribution restrictions that apply to FROBS apply to FROLIC. Have fun. B.