[Coin-standards] CLP?

[Leonardo B Lopes]

Dear Colleagues,

	Here I come again, trying to get our effort restarted after the long 
summer pause. With everybody back settled into their (probably 
overextended) routines, I am going once more to try to borrow just a 
little bit of your time and intellect to see if we can restart work on 
an instance communication format for optimization.

	In my bid to prey you away from work with more immediate rewards for a 
few minutes, I actually have some good news to report, in related efforts:

	* A new version of the free-form SMPS specification paper by Gus Gassmann 
has been sent to the publisher and should come out next year.
	* A new paper by Condevaux-Lanloy, Fragniere and King on manipulating 
linear programs to generate stochastic linear programs is due to be 
published soon, and our own system (including a language extension) will 
be submitted soon.
	* John Forrest released a new version and test results for an LP solver 
(CLP) to the COIN community
	* xerces (A library for manipulating XML) has reached milestone 2.1, 
including much new functionality making the work of manipulating XML easier.
	* Waterloo (Maple) and Wolfram (Mathematica) have released new systems 
with more MathML support than ever, and tout that support as main 
features of their new releases.

	There is much more news of course, but these bullets illustrate three 
points: the value of the work we need to do; the feasibility of doing 
it; and the increased rewards we can obtain if we succeed.

	Even if you don't buy my optimism (I know not everyone does), there is 
still some concrete action we can take from here. In particular, how is 
progress in Laurent Perron's CLP XML representation? I'd like to take a 
look at that before examining how we might go about representing 
variables and matrices.

Thanks for your time,
Leo.
	
-- 
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Leonardo B. Lopes                                      leo at iems.nwu.edu
Ph.D. Candidate                                           (847)491-8470
IEMS - Northwestern University             http://www.iems.nwu.edu/~leo