A Bit about CLIPS

JESS is a superset of CLIPS. On Linux it is a little less obvious how to get the install because CLIPS seems to come with a powerful IDE, but not on Linux. Oh well, on Ubuntu you can install it with:

sudo apt-get install clips clips-common clips-doc

Installing it provides

  • the interpreter
  • a nice man page
  • a help file accessible within the interpreter via ‘(help)
  • /usr/share/doc/clips-common/CLIPS-FAQ a compressed FAQ file readable with zcat or zless or zless to read it.
  • /usr/share/doc/clips-common/html/ Local copy of the main website with links out to stuff like documentation
  • /usr/share/doc/clips-common/examples/ “A number of examples of CLIPS program are available so you can test the interpreter and learn how it works. You can, for example, load one of them with (load “/usr/share/doc/clips-common/examples/wordgame.clp”) and run it using (reset) and (run).”

CLIPS seems like a great place to start with learning at least parts of JESS. I’m guessing that there is a lot of good material between the docs and examples.