Tidying up VHDL with PILS Codecomb - a very early demo

O

Ole Nielsby

This is to inform you of a project that might interest VHDL
developers, or functional programming or wxWidgets
developers.

I am experimenting with the use of my PILS language for
producing free tools for parsing and manipulating VHDL,
using a (wxWidgets based) GUI that lets you select
and view individual operations.

This is still in a very early stage, but VHDL'ers might have
ideas for what the Codecomb tools should do to their VHDL.
So far I implemented two rather trivial transformers: one that
converts keywords to upper case and one that inserts the
optional tokens in END...; sequences - but tell me your
wishes and I might give it a try.

(If your heart is in your dreams...)

The demo works by generating replacement instructions
from the syntax trees. The GUI then displays the replacers
and the VHDL, allowing you to switch them on/off with
Ins/Del keys, which is a fast means for selecting the
replacements you want.

The parser is a funny beast - I banged my head flat against
BFN and LALR, and dumped in favour of coding a state
transformation machine directly in PILS, with a diagnostic
GUI that allows you to see the parser working step by step,
and can point you to the PILS rule responsible to a particular
step.

If you want to see the demo: http://pils.org
You have to unpack it and follow the instructions in the
readme. (No installer. No registry mess.)

The exact terms for the Codecomb VHDL tool aren't clear but
it will be open source and you won't be charged for using it.

PILS is freeware but I won't support military or weaponry
applications and therefore can't set up a sourceforge project,
as the OSI terms forbid discrimination of application fields.
I haven't gotten around to setting up a proper site for it yet,
producing tools of value is of higher priority than web design
right now.

The PILS language is documented by an openoffice document
which is included in the demo archive (but requires openoffice).

Note: FUT has been set to comp.lang.vhdl. If you want to discuss
functional programming or wxWidgets interfacing, please set the ng.

Ole Nielsby, Danish Technological Institute http://www.dti.dk

Btw thanks to those who answered my questions on vhdl grammar
technicalities in comp.lang.vhdl. I might ask more...
 
H

HT-Lab

Ole Nielsby said:
This is to inform you of a project that might interest VHDL
developers, or functional programming or wxWidgets
developers.

I am experimenting with the use of my PILS language for
producing free tools for parsing and manipulating VHDL,
using a (wxWidgets based) GUI that lets you select
and view individual operations.

This is still in a very early stage, but VHDL'ers might have
ideas for what the Codecomb tools should do to their VHDL.
So far I implemented two rather trivial transformers: one that
converts keywords to upper case and one that inserts the
optional tokens in END...; sequences - but tell me your
wishes and I might give it a try.

Well....., what would be nice if you could accept VHDL2006 and translate it
back to VHDL2002. I understand that this might not work for all new language
constructs but it might be doable for features like process(all), simplified
case, case with dontcare values, expressions in portmaps etc etc.

Hans
www.ht-lab.com

PS It would be easier if you use plain zip/tar/gz compression for your work
instead of 7-zips.
 

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