[myhdl-list] A question of philosophy?

[Haitao Z. <ha...@gm...>]

It seems to me there are three different demands put on HDLs: hardware
description itself is mostly declarative (in the sense they describe
structural relationship that can not directly execute on a sequential
program semantics); but it also has a time axis to it (even though
hardware can only be structural some times it is more convenient to be
able to pretend that we can specify it by defining what we want along
the time axis); AND at times we want to add a imperative component to
it: think of parameter evaluation, conditional generation, or even
like myhdl that natively supports simulation. There is tension in
language design if one wants to do all three well. The "normal" HDLs
lack a strong support for the last aspect, while Python is a
inherently sequential language and makes the first (structural) aspect
harder to carry out (?) without some contortion along the way (the
tension between declaration, partial eval, and evaluation). I don't
know if there is a good solution, but I wonder if Jan or anyone else
has given this question some thoughts.

(I am not a CAD or software engineer so pardon me if I butchered the
terminologies here.)

Haitao