30 Al Magazine

The representation language used in one domain is seldom borrowed and adapted to another, because the facilities that were assets for one task become limitations elsewhere. For this reason, most such languages are built from scratch. The goal of the RLL effort is to reduce the amount of time expended in building a representation language, by providing a Representation Language Language, that is, a language that provided the user with the components of many representation languages, and with the ability to integrate them. RLL contains a large library of "representational pieces," for example, the mode of inheritance used by the Examples link of the Units package, or the A-Kind-Of type of slot used in the MIT Frames Representation Language, FRL. A novice user can easily design a language simply by picking an amalgamation of pieces; RLL is responsible for meshing them together into a coherent and working whole.