Re: [vhdl-200x] VHDL enhancements wish list

On 2/21/2011 10:13 AM, Joanne Degroat wrote:
> YEAH!!!
> This may be the first time I had heard someone acknowledge that VHDL is a
> programming language.
> Somebody other than me!! I have been stating in my HDL class since the
> early 1990s that VHDL is
> A decent concurrent programming language, although the overhead for
> execution (as it an HDL), if using it for
> Creating concurrent programs, is too high for such use.
>
> VHDL was designed to model digital hardware. Digital hardware is concurrent
> and by nature a language
> To represent it needs to be concurrent. Digital hardware is (for the most
> part) deterministic and
> A language for it should also be deterministic. VHDL's paradigm is
> deterministic.

Exactly.
Ever wonder why the Signal assignment doesn't happen until the end of
the process? Ever wonder why shared variables are such a pain? VHDL
was designed from the beginning as a parallel processing language. Of
the now many parallel processing languages VHDL is the only one with any
traction, and a concept of what "time" is. We should not loose sight
of this.

To date a few attempts at multithreading have been done. None of them
very successfull. However with 8 CPU chips on the horizon, this is
something which may come back to life quick. Even if you could just
use VHDL just to join C forks together it would be worth investigating.
This is my concept of what ESL should be, just not the industry's.

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