RE: ISAC: Minutes of ISAC meeting held on 17 August 2006

Chuck,

Regarding IR2100: You appear to have the wrong description for the issue in
the minutes. But apart from that, you mentioned the problem that a parameter
that is of a protected type must be of mode inout. That is in conflict with
the requirement that function parameters be of mode in. This is related to
the ramification of various rules that imply that a function method of a
protected type be impure, since the function can access anf potentially
modify state declared outside its declarative region.

I think that a solution to these issues will involve a means to declare
methods as accessors only. That is they can read, but not mutate the state
of the enclosing protected type. A function could then more reasonably have
an in-mode protected-type parameter, provided it only called accessor
methods of the parameter.

This is something that the VHDL-TC Requirements and Extensions SCs might
consider also as part of the class-type extensions to the language.

Cheers,

PA

--
Dr. Peter J. Ashenden         peter@ashenden.com.au
Ashenden Designs Pty. Ltd.    www.ashenden.com.au
PO Box 640                    VoIP: sip://0871270078@sip.internode.on.net
Stirling, SA 5152             Phone (mobile):  +61 414 70 9106
Australia
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-isac@server.eda.org 
> [mailto:owner-isac@server.eda.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Swart
> Sent: Saturday, 26 August 2006 7:25 AM
> To: isac@server.eda.org
> Subject: ISAC: Minutes of ISAC meeting held on 17 August 2006
> 
> 
> Note that I have held up action on IR 2100 because of a 
> possible problem. We can fully discuss this at the next meeting.
> 
> Chuck Swart
> 
>