Early expert system development tools such as EMYCIN, OPS5 and EXPERT are usually very slow because most of them are written in LISP programming language which is nortoriously slow. In order to avoid the performance problem, some expert systems were rewritten in conventional programming languages such as C and Fortran, but they lost the convenience and flexibility which were provided by LISP environment.
Providing sufficient flexibility in reasonable speed, we developed a new expert system tool called KCLIPS combining the environments of Kyoto Common Lisp (KCL) and C Language Production System (CLIPS). The KCLIPS provides a fast rule system yet maintaining the flexibility of KCL. CLIPS rules and facts can be made in KCL environment and the result of a CLIPS run may be returned to KCL environment. KCLIPS was implemented on a SUN workstation and was verified by testing several mixed LISP-CLIPS programs. KCLIPS is proved as a useful tool providing high speed inference capability as well as various LISP functionality.
