Path-Based Rules in Object-Oriented Programming

Abstract

Object-oriented programming has recently emerged as one of the most important programming paradigms. While object-oriented programming clearly owes an intellectual debt to AI, it appears to be displacing some AI techniques, such as rule-based programming, from the marketplace. This need not be so as pathbased rules---forward-chaining production rules that are restricted to follow pointers between objects---fit into the object-oriented paradigm in a clean and elegant way. The combination of path-based rules and object-oriented programming should be useful in AI applications, and in the more general problem of transferring AI techniques to the larger computer science community. To this day, forward-chaining production rules remain largely unused in mainstream object-oriented applications. One reason for this lack of use is, of course, that many production rule systems (such as most versions of OPS (Cooper & Wogrin 1988), etc.) are written in LISP, and not in a major object-oriented lang...