I’m having second thoughts about the ‘contains’ and ‘exists’ now. If you guys think they are a gonna or can be done in other ways I will defer to your expertise.

It would reduce my code too and I like tidy code.

This is interesting…

1. If you allow multiple * in the value=”...” the contains becomes un-necessary, as per Steve’s example above. I never knew standard AIML allowed multiple * in the value, though.

2. Using get with an undefined property returns an empty string or “unknown” (the documentation seems unclear on that point). Also its not clear what name=“myprop” should return if property “myprop” is undefined. In Uberbot I settled on both these returning an empty string.

3. Again I have never seen AIML with <if> in it. And I don’t think it’s needed as it’s covered by the first version of <condition>. In fact I would argue against <if>, and the exists and contains attributes on the grounds of non-use, and on the grounds they can be coded in other ways.

4. I think there is actually a version 1.01 of the AIML spec which may serve better than the v 1.0 you currently found. It’s more up to date and doesn’t have some of the obscure elements and attributes that were never used.

Finally this (to my mind) shows a big need for AIML standardization for AIML v2, along the lines of the excellent spec that was produced for v1.01.

1. Yes I see what you mean. My old spec said one star and I wondered why that was notable.

2. So far I have also returned an empty string pending something better coming to mind.

3. OK so that’s three of you, so <if> is out and also ‘contains’ and ‘exists’ - thanks.

4. Thank you - I will have a dig around.

Pandorabots told me they were working on documentation, so maybe the standardisation will come to pass.

I thought it amusing that Will wrote standardization and I wrote standardisation - there really needs to be a standard

I found that document Will, thanks again for the tip.

Whilst it does not really give examples it does appear to be more up to date. For example the <if> tag is not mentioned, nor the ‘exists’ and ‘contains’ attributes and so on.

I’m dropping this here in case it’s ever useful to others.

http://www.alicebot.org/TR/2001/WD-aiml/

That’s the document that I most used as a guideline for Program O, though I also used the earlier version 1.0 documents, to a lesser extent, for backwards compatibility. Frankly, I agree with Will regarding the attributes and <if> tag, and for the same reasons. If nobody is using them, and if 1.0.1 doesn’t seem to support them, why go through the extra work to support them?

If that seems to be a bit of a contradiction, you’re probably right, but were I to do it all over again, I probably wouldn’t have bothered supporting them.

Yes I left them out in the end, seems pointless putting them in if they are abandoned or as Steve has shown they can be done another way.