The Merlin Control Language
An Introduction
MCL is a special purpose, high level programming language
associated with the Merlin optimization environment.
Merlin accepts commands that determine its route of action.
The user may prepare an input file to Merlin, containing
commands that are to be executed sequentially. This however
is a static, rather than a dynamic way of using Merlin. A
more efficient way is to use it interactively, entering the
commands through a terminal. For example, one may realize
>uring execution, that one of the implemented algorithms has
a superior performance and so may decide to use it
repeatedly, or (since Merlin commands are parametric), one
may determine the values for the so called panel-parameters
that seem to be most effective. On the other hand, this
requires quite some time of on-line experimentation in front
of a terminal which is highly undesirable.
MCL is built to
deal primarily with this problem. It is a comprehensive and
easy to learn language that controls Merlin dynamically, in
the same way a user would from a terminal, yet it does not
require the user's attention or intervention. MCL supports
branching structures, arithmetic operations, and other
features described in detail in this article. To make this
possible, we constructed the MCL-compiler and we added to
Merlin an appropriate "interface" package of subroutines
that perform the additional necessary procedures required by
the language. The MCL object code (MOC) is
input to Merlin and dictates its execution at run-time.
For immediate use of MCL, one needs to be familiar with
the Merlin optimization system, at the user level.
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