[Coin-discuss] Open-source Modeling Languages

[Jun Ma]

Brian,
> I don't think that human readability is the major issue.
Agree. Readability is not the major goal in OSiL by design. But it sort of 
over the past years becomes a "good side-effect".
For example, among other, it helps the debugging and presenting, and 
facilitate the promotion of OSiL as a standard.
Moreover we noticed that paying attention to the readability, doesn't really 
require us to sacrifice efficiency at all.

>Rather, it's the difficulty of reading/writing correct XML from a program 
>in a
> language like C or Fortran without depending on someone else's library.
> It's easy to produce an MPS file with a bunch of loops and
> printf's.  Reading an MPS file is somewhat more difficult but not too
> hard.  It wouldn't be nearly as easy to do the same things with the
> corresponding OSiL XML.

Reading XML does often need third part libraries. But there should be 
plenty, open source or not, out there for any language.
Writing XML shouldn't be any more difficult.
In terms of licensing, the C++ code in Optimization Services doesn't use any 
library in parsing XML.
The Java code, does use third party libraries, but we are distributing the 
Java version on COIN with little licensing issues, as all the libraries we 
use are CPL friendly.
In .net, the XML parser is built in the Microsoft .net framework in its 
foundation class library, thus no licensing issue at all there.

Jun