Subject: RE: 1364.1 pragmas
From: David Bishop (dbishop@server.vhdl.org)
Date: Thu Aug 29 2002 - 06:07:30 PDT
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: BOUNCE vlog-synth@eda.org: Non-member submission from [Steven Sharp<sharp@cadence.com>]
From: Steven Sharp <sharp@cadence.com>
Reply-To: Steven Sharp <sharp@cadence.com>
Subject: RE: 1364.1 pragmas
>As long as the syntax is legal, I thought the interpretation would be
>pretty wide open, recognizing that simulators largely ignore attributes.
I disagree. The meaning of a particular attribute attached to an object
is wide open. What a tool chooses to do with the attributes after it
determines their values is up to the tool. But that doesn't mean the
standard doesn't specify any of the semantics.
Some of the semantics are specified in the section on attributes, like
how the value is determined. More detailed semantics are provided by
the PLI interface to attributes. In my opinion, the PLI interface to
attributes should be taken as the definition of what a tool can extract
about the attributes. It is supposed to provide a completely generic
interface to attributes, and thus defines the semantics of what can be
determined about them. Yes, a tool with its own parser could use
information like the order the attributes appeared (or how many spaces
appeared between them). But if that were supposed to be meaningful,
then the PLI interface would have provided a way of accessing it.
The point of putting them into the standard was to provide some kind
of consistency across tools. There is plenty of flexibility for tools
to interpret the meaning of attributes, without throwing away the few
things about them that were actually specified in the standard.
Steven Sharp
sharp@cadence.com
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