In this paper a complete description of the language syntax of Milord II has been undertaken. In this sense this paper complements others, already referenced throughout the paper, that concentrate on much more formal aspects of the language. Milord II has proved to be a very expressive language to solve problems in very different domains. So, in the near future, we plan to extent its capabilities to distributed environments by wrapping Milord II modules inside computational agents.
Milord II, and its previous language version Milord [24], has been used to develop a series of applications in different fields: Medicine, Pneumon-IA for the diagnosis of common-acquired pneumonia [26, 27], Renoir for the diagnosis of arthropaties [7, 17, 8]; Biology, Spong-IA for the classification of north-atlanto-mediterranean sponges [10, 9]; Agriculture, Gtep-IA for the management of pig farms [19]. Other applications are currently being developed. We think it is worth looking at the references describing applications to get a much clearer idea of the use of the language in different domains.
There is a major component on a language description that has been deliberately omitted here, that is, the semantics of the language. An initial approach to its semantics can be found in [22] but a definite one is still not finished and will merit another paper with more technical contents in the near future. This paper concentrates mainly on the syntax description and the operational view of how a Milord II program executes.
Milord II has been developed in Common Lisp (the interpreter) and in C (the
compiler). This software is available for research and educational
purposes. A fresh version for Macintosh
machines can be obtained by anonymous ftp
at ftp.iiia.csic.es in the directory Milord/mac. You can also find those
versions and more information on Milord II in the WWW at
http://www.iiia.csic.es/~ milord. Versions for PC and Unix environments
will be produced in short time.