Brovnik, if you can track down the following article it covers a lot of what you are describing. It's also pretty easy to implement in Perl.

Decision-making with production systems
Source C/C++ Users Journal archive
Volume 16 , Issue 2 (February 1998) table of contents
Pages: 57 - 66
Year of Publication: 1998
ISSN:1075-2838
Author
Dwayne Phillips
Publisher
CMP Media, Inc. USA

Unfortunately I couldn't find this article on line anywhere. I know it's available on the C/C++ Journal cdrom....

I have a package based on this from a few years ago. However I just checked and it doesn't test out. :(