Re: [myhdl-list] Incorrect conclusions in TSConIT paper

[Christopher F. <chr...@gm...>]

<snip>
>
> The author complains about verboseness and large amounts
> of conditional statements, but fails to take advantage of
> the idiomatic Python way to work with booleans:
>
>       empty = Signal(bool(0))
>       ...
>       empty.next = (dindex == 0)
>
> which would reduce the nr of lines drastically.
>

I agree this is a large flaw by the author.  First, as you
mention, you can do better using common Python idioms.

Second, I am sure there have been many debates (i.e. references)
on the pros/cons of Python/Haskell/Ada.  I believe considerable research 
should be performed on the base languages before the
HDLs. IMO for the analysis in the paper to be useful you would
need a prior Haskell/Python/Ada analysis on /Conciseness/, 
/Comprehensibility/, and /Reusablilty/ before comparing the HDLs
based on the general language.  And the reason you need this is
that you leverage prior debates/analysis, where experienced
designers have been able to comment.  Otherwise the authors
probably have an inherent bias because they are more familiar
with one language or the other.

I suppose the derived HDLs can break the base language feature but 
knowing that a base language had "conciseness" and the derived HDL 
doesn't is useful.

I am not convinced /conciseness/, via the line/word metric, is
useful.  We can write a program with very few lines/words that is
terse and conclude it is compact but most do *not* find terseness
very useful (to me terse is not concise).  I think the author
(unintentionally?) delved into a philosophical debate by relating
the number of words and lines to being concise vs. some actual
objective measurement.


I would say they completely missed the point on /Reusability/!

Regards,
Chris