On 24 October 2011 01:05, David Koontz <[email protected]> wrote: > I found I had difficulty searching through the Ada source, wrongly relying > on OS X's Spotlight when a recent Xcode update had deprecated indexing Ada > source in it's mdimporter. We are seeing both a need for IDE tools as > demonstrated by the parser being 6000 lines long due to the package nature of > Ada and it's verbosity. Being written in Ada means we need a good tool > environment to deal with ghdl, or understand the limits of the tools we do > have.
I once found jedit in the search for replacing emacs as my main editor. It does highlight both ada and vhdl, and the search functions have helped me a lot when looking for features/bugs I didn't write myself. The plug-ins have helped me a lot. Specially the Project Viewer, which lets me define projects with just a few operations. I have tried to use eclipse as my main IDE for editing source files of any kind, but simplicity was sacrificed for power and features. > > There's also the idea-expression distance in describing VHDL either in > specifications or implementations. The VHDL standard appears to inherit > it's structure from demonstrating distinguishing features from Ada (VHDL 7.2 > Language Reference Manual from Intermetrics, 1986, Translation of VHDL to > Ada, Carl F. Schaefer, also of Intermetrics ). The first VHDL > implementations were preprocessors reminiscent of WATFIV or WATFOR adding > case statements and For/While loops to Fortran. The structure of the > standard doesn't lend itself to resolving semantic restrictions to language > syntax nor are there any aftermarket publications aimed at VHDL tool > implementers. Mind you there was a Sense of the VASG which dealt with > interpreting language definition ambiguities at one time. VHDL is probably incorporating the word 'legacy' better than any other programming languages I have met. Not only the language itself, but also the products it implements. Don't touch this, it is working. Makes a good tool rot for what it is worth. Industry does not seem to want cross-compatibility for customer lock-in reasons. Designers seldom understand all of VHDL and stick to the safe things. I think that is the mixture of VHDL-87 and VHDL-93 which in ghdl is --std=93c which I look at every day. Taken that I never really know what the Xilinx analyzer supports until after elaboration has succeded, I don't attempt to use newer features. > > Compare the standard's organizations to say Ada, Verilog, the distinction > between describing distinguishing features and tool flow. You could > contemplate that the restrictions on mentioning implementation dependencies > preserve the ability to create a VHDL preprocessor for Ada today except the > syntax hasn't kept pace with Ada's. The story being VHDL is relatively hard > whether or not it is written in Ada, considering an analyzer and simulator > are only about as complex as a medium sized FPGA these days. > > This particular bug could be better classed as an un-implemented feature, and > there are plenty of FIXME's sprinkled around if we could but see the forest > for the trees. I modified jedit's TaskList plug-in regex to match the FIXME of ghdl and found 361 instances accross uncounted number of files. TaskList can filter the tags to be able to concentrate on the work of rooting out a praticular defect. -- Svenn _______________________________________________ Ghdl-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/ghdl-discuss
