Re: gEDA: FNF: Netlist format for Confluence and Informal

[Tom Hawkins <tom-at-NOSPAMconfluent_dot_org>]

Magnus Danielson wrote:
>>>
>>>What is RTL?
>>
>>Register Transfer Level (RTL) is the most common abstraction level for 
>>digital design.
> 
> 
> Ehum! Register Transfer Logic (RTL).

Some say toe-ma-toe some say toe-may-toe.  :-)

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_transfer_level

Traditionally, RTL sits between behavioral level and gate level.  And 
now there's a lot of marketing buzz about Transaction Level (TL) 
modeling, which is essentially an object-oriented paradigm for hardware 
(think of bus transactions as method calls).

The interesting aspect of behavioral and transaction level modeling is 
there are now tools on the market to synthesize these higher abstraction 
levels.  When will gEDA follow, I wonder?

Though Confluence is an RTL language, it obtains an abstraction level 
higher than Verilog/VHDL do to its functional programming 
characteristics (higher-order datatypes, lexical scoping, referential 
transparency, etc.).

-Tom