sci.op-research

"Christian Plum" wrote in message
news:20d68862-9200-4469-9680-c92197979251@e6g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
On 14 Feb., 19:12, "Bob Daniel"
wrote:
.....
>
....
> Xpress-Mosel was the result of this, and it's radically different in that
> it's a programming language with math programming things as first class
> objects. We decided on this approach as lots of users wanted the ability
> to
> do fairly rigorous data manipulation, comparisons and checking in the same
> place as where the model was defined. Data coming from more than one
> database, which is inherent in modelling using on-line data from
> Production,
> Marketing, Sales, Inventory etc are a fact of life. And IMHO these have to
> be reconciled at one central location in many models.
>
....
>
> I certainly wouldn't decry doing lots of stuff in Access/whatever. If one
> is
> familiar with that then one can clearly be highly productive. As long as
> the
> whatever isn't Excel ...
>
> Bob
> These are my personal opinions.- Skjul tekst i anførselstegn -
>
> - Vis tekst i anførselstegn -

Hi Bob,

Thanks for your qualified insights. The notion that you should be able
to connect to various datasources, be able to do pre - post-processing
in the same language as your model is written in, makes a lot of sence
to me.
It eliminates the problem of passing data between different entities
and gives you more flexibility, etc. It should be a win-win.
But I have trouble seeing why this isnt facilitated best in standard
languages as C++, java or a .NET one. which would instantly give you
the support of all the libraries and expertice that exists for these
languages. So I can follow you in that it eases your work to gather
the data-processing and the model in a language as Xpress-Mosel, but
wouldnt you receive the same benifits using something like ilog
concert, coin-flopc++ or Xpress-BCL ?

Brgds

Christian

===
Horses for courses. I claim that a model written in a high level modelling
language is a) faster to write, b) more obviously correct, c) easier to
maintain and d) easier to hand over to someone else, than one written in C++
etc., even with BCL, and far far better than calling straight into the
optimizer's API. But it depends if you are a programmer or an OR person I
guess.
I do know that lots of our users say "I'll do a Mosel model for speed, and
then for efficiency I'll redo it in BCL". And never make the move.

I'm not dogmatic about it. As long as you don't use Excel ....

Bob
Again, my personal views