[rules-dev] salience alternative with before/after

Davide has suggested a good idea. Now that rules support annotations, and annotations with values. We should add a before/after keyword to each rule. before/after would then take a list of annotations. The idea is to use this to generate salience under the covers. rule resetBalance before( @cashflow ) when then end rule debit @cashflow when then end rule credit @cashflow when then end rule printBalance after(@cashflow ) when then end. Salience gives one rule priority over another, thus it's declaring an implicit relationship between rules. Yet it's a magic number that doesn't easily show this relation, and as the rulebase grows it can be very hard to determine those relationships as specified by salience from reading the rules. before/after allows you to specify declarative the relationships betwen rules in a more maintainable and readable way, even if under the covers it's just generating: rule resetBalance salience 100 when then end rule debit salience 0 when then end rule credit salience 0 when then end rule printBalance saliance -100 when then end. Yes there are agenda-groups and ruleflow-groups, but they can be a bit cumbersome compared to the simplicity of using salience. This way we get the simplicity of using salience, without the downfalls of it being a magic number. What do people think? Any ideas on how we can improve this? At build time it would have to report impossible to resolve relationships and barf. Mark