V G wrote:

>> The whole point of Verilog and VHDL is to actually hide the
>> implementation details. Tools exist to convert the FPGA design to an
>> ASIC.
>=20
> You could say the same for C. The whole point is to hide the low
> level stuff generated by the compiler. All I'm saying is, personally,
> I need to know what's being hidden so I can truly understand what's
> going on.

You may be able to see this the other way 'round. I just ported a rather
complex C++ application from Linux for x86 Intel type processors to
Linux for IBM System z processors. I do have some understanding of how a
modern x86 type processor works, but really understanding it is simply
out of my scope -- that's a whole professional life of its own. Much
less do I fully understand an IBM System z processor.

However, what made it possible for me to port is that I understand C++,
particularly here constructs that are commonly used but not actually
guaranteed by the language standard. When you understand the language,
there is a whole lot you can do with this -- it is a system of its own.
In this case, this enabled me to find whatever was there in the code
that assumed running on an Intel processor, doing things that were not
guaranteed by the language. (Endian-dependent code is one of these.)

What you may want are examples of what a language does with whatever you
feed it, so that you get a better understanding of the language
constructs. But with a language of any complexity, you should not forget
that these are only examples -- what a compiler does in a specific case
is rarely deterministic in the sense that you can know it before you see
what it actually did. C is a very simple language, and it already has
this characteristic with decent compilers. I'm quite sure that the
optimizers in decent Verilog compilers are much more complex, and rarely
allow you to know what a certain line of code does -- notwithstanding
the fact that translating a few versions of a simple program, with small
changes from one to the other, into a schematic probably helps you
understand the language better.=20

Gerhard
--=20
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