I’ve previously mentioned that I’m working on a static analysis tool for productions. Basically it gives you a score that reflects the match between two productions based on their conditions and actions. This allows you to visualize their relationships without ever having to run the model. A huge chunk of the basic logic is done and thanks to the joys of open source tools and my new favorite project, Zest, after a day of tinkering I’ve got a basic (but far from ideal) visualization tool:
Here we’ve got the unit one semantic model showing one of the three different view types: following. This shows which productions can follow the chain-category production. You can also view proceeding productions (those leading into chain-category, which only shows initial-retrieve in green), or All (showing all the productions and all their relationships).
It’s still not perfect. It’s not handling chunk type tests (simple addition), nor variables (bloody impossible without a hypothesis testing tool too), nor more comparison slot tests (less-than, etc). But all in all, pretty damned cool and useful.
