I am trying to build an Expert system and my UI is prepared in .Net and now I am willing to connect it to LISP

Question

Hello!

I am trying to write an Expert System from scratch. I am a beginner at this and need some help with my project.

My UI is a .NET Windows application and now I want to connect to it to LISP to prepare the knowledge base.

Okay, so this is my plan... what do you guys think? Any ideas or suggestions will help.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I think the best system would be to embed something like IronScheme into your program.

These allow Scheme code to interface with .NET. You can supply functions to it which can be executed from Scheme, which supplement the standard .NET ones.

Otherwise, there isn't much you can do. Are you using any LISP-specific features which require LISP? Otherwise just put the rules into a file and parse it.

Answer 2

There are several ways. If you want to use non-toy lisps, then you have to use some kind of IPC to Lisp program because almost all lisp implementation run in their own processes (with the exception of ECL and possibly Allegro CL). So there are several options:

• SWANK which is the protocol to control Lisp runtime and implementations of it for several Lisps. However, it is tailored for IDE needs so may or may not be very useful to you.
• FOIL which is the interface between Lisp and .NET/Java.

PS. 'Lisp' nowadays means 'Common Lisp', so I assumed that you are talking about it.

Answer 3

You could look at Slime (the Emacs mode) and how connects to a Lisp process. You could build your UI to communicate using the same RPC protocol to the Swank back-end that Slime talks to.

There is an overview of Slime by Bill Clementson. For even more details see Tobias Rittweiler's excellent SLIME presentation