Re: Draft PAR for further comment

John Michael Williams (jwill@pacbell.net)
Tue, 06 Jul 1999 10:19:04 -0700

Kamal.Hashmi@icl.com wrote:
> ...
> Jim Heaton, myself and Peter Ashenden also shared this
> concern, and at the meeting last year between the two
> groups (at FDL'98) we agreed that the OO group would
> not consider the SUAVE communications extensions but that
> Peter would join the SID group and address his ideas
> in this sphere to this group.
>
> Also we agreed that both groups would kep an eye on each
> others proposals to make sure that the extensions did not
> come into gross conflict.

Actually, this is the REAL concern, in my opinion: Constructs
that might be mutually incompatible. I guess we all
have had problems with EDA tools which would not work
together because of any of a variety of incompatibilities.

I think previous opinions about ensuring well defined
boundaries between SID & OOVHDL might have been unnecessarily
strict: I don't see a lot of harm in writing a standard
which EXACTLY copied some well-defined constructs from
existing, approved standards, in order to ensure
unambiguous statement of the strictly OO construct
(whether the OO standard were part of a larger document
or not).

There is a very big maintenance problem divvying up
everything perfectly neatly, when citing constructs
from existing standards: If the cited standard should be
revised, the citation would become invalid. This problem
grows, as constructs become more mutually exclusive.

I guess this is an argument in favor of issuing an OOVHDL
standard as a chapter in the 1076 document.

-- 
                         John
                     jwill@pacbell.net
                     John Michael Williams