Abstract
The CSIR03 Division of Building Research (DBR) has built a number of text‐based and graphics‐based design code expert systems in PROLOG. Each of these systems involves several thousand lines of PROLOG and stretches to the limit and the capacity of the IBM ATs on which they run. We have found PROLOG to be a very powerful language for expressing the complex rules and relationships found in building design codes and related applications. Nevertheless, it has a number of weaknesses, particularly in expressing procedural knowledge and arithmetic relationships, and in implementing complex tables and user interfaces. We have designed and implemented extensions to PROLOG to overcome these difficulties. These include new built‐in functions to perform functions that are difficult to code in PROLOG, an easy way to add further built‐in functions, a meta‐interpreter to keep track of intermediate results, sets of routines to support user input and explanation, and a definite clause grammar to implement a more syntactically pleasant language for writing rules. These extensions are being used to develop a larger and much more complete version of the WINDLOADER expert system, and have greatly facilitated this task.
Published Version
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