Chapter 4. Getting started with the Jess language

In this chapter you’ll...

  • Learn the basic syntax of Jess
  • Work with basic Jess control structures
  • Find out how to define functions in Jess

This chapter is an introduction to the Jess rule language. It will not teach you how to write rules—that will have to wait for chapter 7—but it will explain how to write code in the Jess rule language, and you’ll need this ability to write the right-hand sides of rules. The Jess rule language is also a general-purpose programming language, and you can use it even without writing any rules.

The next few chapters contain syntax diagrams to concisely describe the syntax of some of the more complicated expressions. In these diagrams:

  • Text in <angle-brackets ...

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