Howard Rogers
|
The talk will cover the use of decision tables in a variety of programming languages and software products and follow the development from simple Condition/Action tables to those with Initial Action and Multi-condition sections. This will include a brief history of the use of decision tables in IT from the 1970’s to present day. Table structures and rule formats used will be shown. The speaker will cover the topics of rule redundancy, rule reduction and optimisation as well as bit masking techniques for runtime evaluation, and demonstrate the importance of relevance testing. Examples of code will be used to show shortcut compact coding techniques and comparison with simple truth logic. There will be an explanation of the benefits and downsides of tools which use interpretive execution of decision table logic and those which use tokenised or fully compiled execution. Examples of program code and complex logic coding will be given and comparison made with “conventional” programming languages, which will demonstrate that Decision Tables can be used not just as visual representations of complex logical processing but also as a practical and efficient programming tool. A summary of current programming and application development tools which use decision tables will be given, and the speaker will discuss future developments and techniques that will allow decision table structured and expressed logic to be incorporated in other programming languages.
|