ISAC: minutes of meeting held 21 July 2005

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Minutes of ISAC meeting held via telecom on 21 July 2005

Present: Peter Ashenden, Jim Lewis, Chuck Swart, Ajay Verikat

Absent:  Deepak Pant, Larry Soule

Next Meeting: Thursday August 11 2005, 6 pm Pacific Daylight Time
              (Friday August 12 2005, 1 am GMT)

TOPIC: Status of Web Based IR System

Chuck reports that:

The server is up and Bugzilla is running on it. I'm playing around
with it.  The sever is not yet accessible from outside Mentor. It will
be made publicly available as soon as a small number of minor issues
are resolved.

ACTION: Chuck to continue with this.

TOPIC: Relationship between Accellera and ISAC.

The current role of the ISAC is to interpret or explain language
definition problems and to forward enhancement requests to the
VASG. The ISAC occasionally points out potential problems associated
with enhancement requests.  It was decided that this is still the
appropriate role for the ISAC. In particular, the ISAC will still
forward enhancement requests to the appropriate parties and will not
try to deal with the design or implementation of enhancements beyond
the technical analysis that it currently does.

As an offshoot of this discussion, Peter agreed to examine the
official IEEE policies for standards interpretation.

ACTION: Peter to research IEEE official policies for standards
interpretation.  (Note: done. See email titled: "Info on
interpretations and explanations".

TOPIC: IR 2069 Visibility of generics in block configurations 

An entity is configured. A generic value from the top entity is used
to configure a deeply nested external block. The submitter asks whether or
not this is legal.

A quick glance at the LRM indicates that this is illegal. The various
rules for scope, visibility and extended regions in general do not
apply to external blocks.

Extending the LRM rules to make this code legal might be useful to the
designer, but could be very difficult to implement. However, the
submitter did not ask for a language enhancement.

ACTION: Chuck to analyze

TOPIC: IR 2043 Numeric VALUE attribute parameter can't have sign 

This was approved as written.

ACTION: Chuck to forward to VASG after submitting for final review.

TOPIC: IR2062 Range staticness

This was approved as written.(A small typo was fixed.)

ACTION: Chuck to forward to VASG after submitting for final review.

TOPIC: IR 2064  Type conversion of unconstrained output in a port map

In a prior email (titled:"FW: IR 2064") Peter provided an alternative
analysis.

ACTION: Chuck to integrate this analysis and to send out for a vote. 

TOPIC: IR 2065 OTHERS in aggregates too restrictive

It was agreed that solutions to this problem are beyond the role of
the ISAC. Chuck will provide analysis pointing out some of the
difficulties in removing restrictions on OTHERS in aggregates.

ACTION: Chuck to provide analysis.