wxCLIPS 1.40 17/6/95
--------------------

wxCLIPS is a simple development environment for writing CLIPS
programs.

CLIPS is NASA's expert system language, with support for rule-based,
functional and object-oriented programming.

wxCLIPS includes a growing number of functions to allow the
construction of GUI elements, essentially a CLIPS binding for a subset
of the wxWindows GUI library. Features include:

 - frame, text window, canvas, panel and dialog functions.
 - fonts, pens, brushes, bitmaps
 - toolbar creation functions
 - DDE functions
 - simplified ODBC support under Windows (for which you need ODBC,
   included in e.g. MS Office)

Up-to-date wxCLIPS information is available at our WWW site:

http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~jacs/wxclips.html

You can join the wxCLIPS mailing list by sending a message to:

wxclips-request@aiai.ed.ac.uk

Installation - IMPORTANT: READ ME!
----------------------------------

To install from a zip achive
----------------------------

To install wxCLIPS under Windows 3.1, do something like the following:

c:\> mkdir wxclips
c:\> cd wxclips
c:\wxclips> unzip -d a:wxclips.zip

The -d is needed - it constructs a directory hierarchy.

Now put c:\wxclips\wxclips.exe in your Program Manager or whatever shell
you use. You should also have the help file wxclips.hlp accessible,

Copy ctl3dv2.dll to your windows\system directory if it's not there
already, and then:

 *** delete it from your wxCLIPS installation directory ***

or wxCLIPS will NOT run correctly). This is crucial.

To install using the installation software
------------------------------------------

If wxCLIPS is supplied with the installation utility install.exe,
just run this. Specify a destination directory other than the
one containing the installation files. If you don't have ODBC.DLL
in your WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory, check the third option ON to copy
ODBC.DLL across. You may already have ODBC.DLL in which case, don't
copy it: yours may be a more up-to-date version.

Samples
-------

There is a sample in the 'examples' directory called hello.clp. Use
the "File | Load definitions" menu command to load the file, and then
the "Application | Start application" menu command to run the demo.

PLEASE NOTE that you should run this sample with the current
directory set to the correct examples directory, by editing
the Program Manager item properties. Otherwise, files needed by
the demo may not be found.

There's also a sample called ddetest.clp which shows how to access
a DDE server (in this case the Program Manager).

Other samples in this directory are slightly modified standard CLIPS
samples. For the fuzzified version of wxCLIPS only, try the shower example
in 'examples\fuzzy'.

Source notes
------------

To recompile wxCLIPS, you need wxWindows 1.61 and the source
for wxCLIPS which can be found at our ftp site:

  ftp://ftp.aiai.ed.ac.uk/pub/packages/wxclips/

You also need the source for CLIPS 5.1, 6.0 or 6.0 with fuzzy
extensions. Before compiling CLIPS, copy the modified CLIPS sources from
one of the directories clips5.1, clips6.0 and fuzzy into the CLIPS
source directory, and edit setup.h according to environment and
compiler.

Possibly the easiest thing is to get the modified Fuzzy CLIPS source in
/pub/wxclips/fuzzy (it's backward compatible with CLIPS 6.0)
rather than worrying about copying modified files over CLIPS 6.0.

See also the compilation notes in the PostScript, wxHelp or WinHelp
manual.

There are Motif and Open Look versions of wxCLIPS for the Sun 4
(not necessarily up-to-date ones).

Anyone wanting more information can contact me or look at the
wxCLIPS World Wide Web location above.

Copyright issues
----------------

CLIPS is 'almost free' (subject to COSMIC's rather unfathomable
licensing rules) and ftpable.

wxCLIPS and wxWindows are free of charge, and of course do not come with
any guarantee at all, except the certainty of containing a few bugs!

Good luck,

Julian Smart (Dr)

Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute
University of Edinburgh
80 South Bridge
Edinburgh
EH1 1DT

J.Smart@ed.ac.uk
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~jacs/
