[Coin-discuss] Rima: YAML for Lua

[Geoff Leyland]

Hi,

Rima is new math modelling system and binding to CLP, CBC and lpsolve  
for Lua [1], and I'm very keen to get some feedback on it.  It's very  
much an alpha (or less, source only so far) project at the moment, but  
it has some nice features:

  - unlike most of the bindings to procedural languages I'm aware of  
(I'm happy to be corrected here), models are symbolic and functional  
rather than imperative
  - Rima allows very rich interaction with data structures - dynamic  
objects and duck typing for math modelling
  - models are very easily encapsulated and extended
  - there's strong and flexible separation between models and data.   
All data is late bound, and functions and expressions are just data
  - there's just a sniff of a hint of a start of a system for  
composing models from parts

To get an idea of what I'm on about, it's probably best to have a look  
at http://www.incremental.co.nz/projects/rima/knapsack.html

On the other hand, the binding to the solvers is very simplistic: at  
the moment I'm interested getting from a clean expression of a problem  
to a sparse representation of the corresponding constraint matrix, but  
I'd be interested to hear what solver control features you think are  
high priority.

Documentation starts at http://www.incremental.co.nz/projects/ 
lua.html , development is hosted on google code at http://code.google.com/p/rima/ 
  , and you can get the tarball from http://rima.googlecode.com/files/rima-0.02.tar.gz

If there's interest, I'll start doing what's needed to submit rima to  
COIN.

Cheers,
Geoff

[1] http://www.lua.org