P1076 September 22, 2011 Meeting Minutes

Attendees:

• DavidKoontz * HansTiggeler * JarekKaczynski * JohnShields * MartinThompson * PeterFlake * ChrisHiggs * CharlesGardiner

Agenda:

• Approve September 8 Minutes
  • MOVE: JarekKaczynski SECOND: JohnShields * PeterFlake
• Review Conditional Compilation
  • John Shields to lead discussion as Jim is out

Discussion

• We discussed Peter's perspective on the proposal which culled out 2 key requirements that were compelling and suggested a minimalist preprocessor solution. This was posted on the reflector and will be incorporated as a perspective on the preprocessor implementation. We discussed whether that was too minimalist or not.
• There was interest in seeing this as a separate standard in some manner. John suggested that the packaging was an orthogonal concern, that we only have PAR for 1076 as a context, and the same people would conclude what they wanted for a technical solution first before any alternative packaging aspect was worth dealing with.
• We reviewed the requirements in some detail. The idea that we do or don't want to solve this was debated. There was concern about preprocessing making vhdl more unreadable. There was pretty good acknowledgement that this was a legitimate problem. It is possible to limit macro substitution to avoid making vhdl too unreadable.
• We talked about conditional compilation directives being implemented externally as a separate preprocessor vs internally as part of the lexer. It was argued that the specification does not preclude either approach in any tools and we should not/cannot prescribe implementation constraints in any case.
• We considered the idea of using off the shelf standard components like cpp and m4 and standardizing on their use. There are tradeoffs and no conclusion about this being a good alternative was made. It is worthy to add this as a candidate alternative to the twiki.
• We ran 1 1/2 hours and ended. There was no time to drill down into details of preprocessor features.

Action Items:

• AI John to update minutes with a few high points, others to review and improve, if necessary
• John to update Conditional Compilation Proposal with Peter's post and add a new implementation alternative for using a existing industry standard preprocessor as the "standard" vhdl approach.

Next Meeting Date (proposed):

Thursday October 13, 8 am Pacific