Minutes of ISAC meeting held via telecom on 09 December 2004. Present: Peter Ashenden, Deepak Pant, Chuck Swart, Ajay Varikat Absent: Jim Lewis, Larry Soule Next Meeting: Thursday 06 January 2005 7pm Pacific Time. TOPIC IR2040: Problems with OTHERS in aggregates Peter suggested some wording changes which removed redundant clauses which could cause misinterpretations. Ajay accepted these changes. Chuck pointed out that section 7.3.2.2 mentions the subtype of an aggregate and the index subtype of an aggregate. These are technically incorrect. Aggregates have ranges, but not subtypes. ACTION: Ajay to incorporate Peter's suggestions. Chuck to issue a separate IR on subtypes in aggregates. All: to vote on Ajay's next revision. TOPIC: IR 2048 Miscellaneous errors Twelve issues were raised by the IR and extensive discussion occurred. See the attached analysis of this IR for details. Note: Chuck performed the first pass of the analysis. Someone else needs to take this over. ACTION: ALL to review, someone to continue analysis. TOPIC: IR 2015 Generics should be able to incorporate other generics Chuck check Ada 95 and discovered that Ada does not allow the proposed extension (incorporated into the analysis of the IR). This entire issue is part of an effort to enhance generics as part of Fast Track. ACTION: ALL to vote on forwarding this to Fast Track TOPIC: IR 2018 Variable IN parameter should be no different than constant Parameters of access type were discussed. It was mentioned that if a parameter of class VARIABLE mode IN were of an access type, then the designated value is still of class VARIABLE, hence is modifiable. So the correct semantics of such a parameter is that you can't change the access value, but you can change the designated value. It might be useful to adopt a notation to deal with this (similar to the multiple locations of CONST in C++). In any event, the basic issue which the IR proposes is rejected: There is merit in both constants and variables of mode IN. ACTION: ALL to vote on approving this IR. TOPIC: IR 2019 Reading outputs from within architecture This is Fast Track Issue 12. ACTION: ALL to vote on forwarding this IR to Fast Track TOPIC: IR 2020 keyword REPORT is over-used The submitter has a vailid point in that the addition or deletion of a single ";" produces two legal but very different sequences of statements. However, there is no realistic way to repair this without breaking backward compatibility. ACTION: ALL to vote on approving this IR. TOPIC: IR 2021 Dynamic hardware construct As part of the discussion it was stated (by Chuck) that we will eventually need some way to factor designs into a "hardware" section and a "testbench" section with relaxed semantics for testbenches. This particular IR needs considerable refinement to gather requirements, and should be forwarded to the 200X subcommittee. ACTION: ALL to vote on forwarding this IR to 200X SC TOPIC: IR 2022 Elements of constant composite to be locally static This request should be part of Fast Track 22. ACTION: Chuck to analyze/edit. ALL to vote on forwarding this IR to FT 22. TOPIC: IR 2023 Add predefined array types for integer, boolean, real and time The obvious vector types to add are: REAL_VECTOR (which is in the 1076.1 package STANDARD) BOOLEAN_VECTOR INTEGER_VECTOR TIME_VECTOR The major question here is that of backward compatibility. Packages currently define these types would have to be modified. The ISAC members do not have enough information to judge how serious this impact would be. NOTE: I (Chuck) spoke with VASG chair about this. His recommendation is that we try to get information from various sources such as comp.lang.vhdl and the 200X mail group, then make our best educated guess about the solution. ACTION: Someone (any volunteers?) needs to contact various public forums about this issue.