Re: ADA vs VHDL

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

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On Fri, 30 Oct 1998, Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote:
> Gerhard Griessnig a écrit dans le message
... snip ...
> >We need a comparison between VHDL and ADA in  Hardware/Software -
> >Codesign and simulation.
> >Does anybody know needful information or literature.
> >
> There is a connection between the languages; in a sense, VHDL is to hardware
> what Ada is to software. For example, there is an Ada CD-ROM tha includes
> also
> some VHDL.

Well, I sure hope that isn't true, otherwise Ada has little chance of
acceptance in the US hardware design community, where VHDL is in general 
not thought of highly. Yes, I realize that the same statement could be
made about Ada, but IMO the added complexity of Ada over C brings
significant advantages to the programmer (not to mention that Ada is
*less* complicated than C++) which the added complexity of VHDL over
Verilog does not bring to the hardware designer. 

VHDL has mostly a superficial similarity to Ada, having butchered both the 
package system and generics. That's my opinion, worth every cent you paid
for it ;-) That doesn't mean I think Verilog is great, just that the 
analogy Ada:VHDL as C:Verilog doesn't work for me.

There was someone proposing to use an Ada subset for hardware design, and
I posted the reference in response to another query a while ago.

-- Brian