Comet version 2.0-Beta released
Comet version 2.0-Beta can now be downloaded from Dynadec's Download page.
Here are some of the new things in this version, from the announcement:
Dynadec is happy to announce the pre-release of Comet 2.0. This new version is a major development and here are some of the main new features:1. New XML library (cotxml) to read and write XML files.
2. New visualization library (qtvisual) using the Qt toolkit on all platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows).
3. New graphical debugger (-gqt command line option) on all platforms.
4. New support for external plugins.
5. New Comet language documentation with code samples.Please look at the release notes for more details on this new version.
I haven't checked much on the list yet, but I'm very excited about the over 320 pages Comet Tutorial which is really great, and the circa 60 new accompanying examples.
From the Preface of the Comet Tutorial:
This document is a tutorial about Comet, an hybrid optimization system, combining constraint programming, local search, and linear and integer programming. It is also a full object-oriented, garbage collected programming language, featuring some advanced control structures for search and parallel programming.
This tutorial describes the basic functionalities of Comet 2.0 and how Comet can be used to solve a variety of combinatorial optimization applications. It complements the API description which describes the various classes, functions, interfaces, and libraries through a set of HTML pages. This document is constantly evolving to cover more functionalities of the Comet system and to explain how to use Comet on increasingly complex problems. The Comet system itself is constantly evolving and the material will be updated accordingly.
The tutorial is currently divided in four parts: the description of the programming language, constraint programming, local search, and mathematical programming. A fifth part, describing some of the Comet libraries, and a sixth part, describing the graphical and visualization layers, will be added subsequently. Questions about Comet, its uses, and bug reports can be posted at the Dynadec forum at http://forums.dynadec.com/.
For more about Comet, for example my own (about 160) Comet models, see My Comet page.