Inspirations

As the reader will notice, CLAIRE draws its inspiration from a large number of existing languages. A non-exhaustive list would include SMALLTALK for the object-oriented aspects, SETL for the set programming aspects, OPS5 for the production rules, LISP for the reflection and the functional programming aspects, ML for the polymorphism and C for the general programming philosophy. As far as its ancestors are concerned, CLAIRE is very much influenced by LORE, a language developed in the mid 80s for knowledge representation. It was also influenced by LAURE but is much smaller and does not retain the original features of LAURE such as constraints or deductive rules. CLAIRE is also closer to C in its spirit and its syntax than LAURE was.