Production rules as programming

摘要

Programming with rules is a small part of or not present at all in most curricula. We feel that is unfortunate. For a broad spectrum of problems rule based programs express the essentials of the algorithms well. Despite the common wisdom that some languages are best for certain types of problems, we find that rule based programs are as simple as procedural programs, even for typical 'procedural' problems.In this paper we first give a brief example of rule programming concentrating on its differences from procedural programming. We then show examples of how directly rule programs can follow the common conceptualizations of certain types of problems. In order to quantify the simplicity of rule programs, we compare entropies of procedural and rule based programs for typical procedural programming tasks.