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On Mon, 22 May 2006, Treutwein Bernhard wrote:
> Stan wrote:
> XML trades off efficiency for flexibility. BB's .odc
> encoding is not human readable, and although its encoding
> scheme is printable it is not human-decipherable.
It depends on the implementation of your XML writer whether
or not XML will be human decipherable. Let me give you two examples.
A few years ago I attended a Xilinx training seminar on
FPGA programming. One of the topics was comparison between
different "design flows" of implementing a finite impulse response
digital filter (FIR). One "design flow" was to write the VHDL
code by hand, by filling in some details in a template code
they provided. It was about one page of code, very readable.
Another "design flow" was to use a so-called System Generator
running on top of Matlab. The System Generator is a highly
graphical tool, where a user is combining predefined boxes
and connecting them graphically with wires. (See Xilinx web
site for details about System Generator.) The Matlab engine
then parses the graphic and creates VHDL code that in principle
should be human-readable. Out of curiosity I looked into that code.
It turned out not to be readable. There were several files
and each was quite large. There were some constructs in these
files that puzzled even the System Generator designers, when
I showed the code to them. The code could be compiled and
it produced a FIR filter which was just as efficient as the
hand-coded version. However, if you were given the machine-generated
VHDL text, you would have thought it was a very large and complex
problem. It would not be at all apparent that the same problem
could be written by hand in a much more compact and clear form.
Another example is various ..-to-C translators, such as Oberon-to-C
translator Ofront or Fortran-to-C translator f2c. In principle,
the C code can be very readable. A sane programmer will always write
his/her code in a human- readable form, even in C. However, the
output from the translators are quite unreadable. They are not meant
to be read by humans, unless a human is either a hacker or the author
of a given translator.
I do not know how your XML converter is going to work, but please
do not assume that using an ASCII-based representation will automatically
make the output any more readable than a binary file would have been.
Bernhard Treutwein wrote:
> Let me add another one: Changing a subsystem name in
> BlackBox (of an active element like Stamp elemnts, the
> clock or the commander) leads to changes which might
> be doable with a search & replace in a XML reperesentation
> of the odc. I have no idea how this could be handled in
> the odc format.
When you change the name of the module in the XML file
from say Clock to say Timer, you still have to develop and
distribute the code for the Timer module, do you not?
Otherwise you will get an Alien view instead of the Timer.
So where is the gain of making such a change?
W.
--- BlackBox
--- send subject HELP or UNSUBSCRIBE to blackbox{([at]})nowhere.xy
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Received on Mon May 22 2006 - 17:41:25 UTC