Out of curiosity, I have tried, without success, to use the new facility in nlm to specify the gradient and hessian. (It is many years since I had a problem simple enough to make analytic derivation of these worthwhile.) The help now says that the function must have attributes with these names but gives no indication as to what should be in the attributes. The online example and demo do not use the new feature. I tried supplying the gradient attribute as a function, as this seemed most logical, but nothing changed in the results. In fact, no matter what I supplied, even a character string in the attribute, I got no reaction from nlm. So I took a look at the C code and found that nlm seems to be looking for a numerical vector of the same length as the parameter vector in the attribute. I am not sure what this could be as the gradient will change as nlm searches through different sets of parameter values. In any case, supplying such a vector quite arbitrarily also was completely ignored by nlm. (I also tried looking in the nlme code for examples without success.) Can anyone supply a simple example of how to use the gradient attribute with nlm please? Even better would be an example where it actually was worthwhile to supply it by an improvement in the results from nlm... Thanks. Jim -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._