C++ wrapper for NPSOL

[John W. Eaton]

On 23-Sep-1997, Heber Farnsworth <address@hidden> wrote:

|       Because a great deal of my work involves optimization and because my 
| research is academic rather than commercial I have obtained a copy
| of NPSOL from Stanford which is an optimizer but is not free
| software.  I can compile the fortran sources to get npsol.a but I
| don't have the C++ wrapper I need to make this a dynamically linked
| function that I can call from within Octave.
|       
|       I believe such code used to be included in older versions of Octave but 
| was dropped because NPSOL is not free.  This makes sense.  However I
| have need of this code.  Does anyone have any such code lying
| around?

Yes, it was dropped from the distribution because Richard Stallman
tells me that it is a violation of the GPL to distribute code with
Octave that must be linked with proprietary software in order for it
to work.

| I am not a C++ guy or I suppose I could write it myself (my
| guess is that it isn't hard).

No, it is not that hard.  You could probably use one of the other
functions like lsode as an example.  But once you are done, you would
not be able to legally distribute it.

I am hoping to find an optimization expert to help provide freely
availble optimization tools.  Would anyone like to help provide
something in this area?

Thanks,

jwe