[Coin-discuss] setColSolution, setRowPrice

[Antonio Frangioni]

>	My vote is to drop these routines unless someone has a good example
>where they are truly useful.

I would rather keep them.

Admittedly, the format is more likely to be useful to Interior Point solvers
rather than to Simplex-based ones. Although I can offer no specific example,
I guess that it may be possible to construct good starting interior solutions
for IP methods by exploiting the structure of the problem at hand in a more
clever way than a generic solver could.

The question may be whether we need a different set of methods to allow a
specific initialization for Simplex-based methods. I've been thinking about
it for some time, and I could reach no definitive conclusion. Maybe the
answer is "yes, when the OSI interface moves to having OSI_Simplex subclasses
as well as OSI_IP subclasses". In this case, we may either move the current
version to OSI_IP or keep 'em in the more general interface.

It is clearly possible to try to guess a base out of the values of the
variables. The fact that it is not currently implemented does not mean
that it is not worth keeping it in the interface. Maybe, each implementation
should just declare in the comments if it uses it or not, so that the user
knows if it's worth thinking about providing these values or not.

					Regards

					Antonio