I wish Perl6 were out!

And why, pray tell, would a self confessed 'Pythonista' be waiting on Perl6?

I'll tell you. I think that in the search for the language, Perl 6 looks as if it may be simulated annealing at work with the temperature turned up high. From studying Perl 6 and adapting/using what it gets right we might find ways to improve Python whilst keeping Pythons aims.

An Open Letter to the Blogspot Team

Your editors for creating new posts and especially for creating comments just are not good enough!



As a programmer I have to use external programs to highlight the syntax of code for a new post which is bad, but the list of usable tags in a comment field is so small that I am reduced to writing a program to parse indented code and spit out something that will look merely OK.



Contrast Blogger editing with this which is available on Wikipedia.



Blogger, catch up!


- Paddy.

On assertions and regular expressions

Text editor is to regular expression as
Waveform is to ... assertion


What I mean is that bump in productivity you get when you've learnt to
use regular expressions with vi/vim/sed/awk/perl/grep... on the unix
command line should be matched by an equal jump in productivity if you
use assertions in your digital design flow.

At the moment, the main digital simulation vendors such as Cadence ncsim, and Mentor questasim allow you to embed or attach assertions to designs that are compiled for simulation, and will automatically extract coverage for these assertions.

What is not so widespread, and what needs to be improved, is the use of interpreted assertions at the command lines of waveform browsers/debugging environments to help navigate waveforms (go to the second write after a read of memory in the range ...),; and to help aggregate displayed waveforms for better understanding of what is shown (highlight any overlap of a write on bus1 with a write on bus2).


I'm currently doing a mind experiment on turning assertions on VCD files, into regular expressions on a string.


- Paddy.