ISAC: Minutes from meeting 02 July 2008

Note significant time change to am from pm (West coast)
Also, next week's meeting is on Wednesday, not Thursday.

Chuck


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Minutes of ISAC meeting held via telecon on 02 July 2008

Present: Peter Ashenden, Chuck Swart, Ajay Verikat

Absent: Jim Lewis, Larry Soule, Lance Thompson

Next meeting: Wednesday, July 9, 2008, 7 am Pacific Daylight time
             (Wednesday, July 9  2008, 2 pm GMT)

NOTE: Temporary day change from Thursday to Wednesday and 
      Permanent SIGNIFICANT TIME CHANGE.

TOPIC: IEEE Ballot

There have been 20 votes received, 18 affirmative, 1 negative, 1 abstention.
We need 25 more votes to achieve quorum.

The negative ballot asks for a separate annex for VHPI related
features and a statement that implementation is optional. This vote
would have been more appropriate on the original VHPI ballot, since
VHPI is now officially part of VHDL-2007. In addition VHPI support
requires basic changes to the core VHDL language. In particular, it
requires refinement of the simulation cycle.  It would be very
difficult to maintain two versions of the simulation cycle.  Also, a
legal core implementation could choose to not implement any of the
capability sets and would be conforming as long as it provided a
minimal API to allow a design to determine the appropriate value for
the vhpiCapabilitiesP property.

ACTION: Chuck to issue Bugz, Peter to prepare ballot response.

There was an editorial comment stating the the 754 standard should
not be listed in the bibliography since it is a normative reference.
This comment might also apply to the 954 standard.

ACTION: Chuck to issue Bugz, assign to Peter.

The process is proceeding properly for IEC coordination. Chuck read an
email to this effect from Dennis Brophy, the IEC coordinator.

TOPIC: Bugz 235 Error in name of property of foreignf class

The proposed changes have been incorporated and the Bugz is
resolved, fixed.

ACTION: None.

Topic: Bugz 236 Wrong case for specName property of blockConfig class

The proposed changes have been incorporated and the Bugz is
resolved, fixed.

ACTION: None.

TOPIC: Bugz 241 IR2133: Not locally static expression is synthesized
but not compiled for simulation

The proposed changes have been accepted.

ACTION: Update to resolved, fixed.

TOPIC: Bugz 234 Backward incompatibility for std_logic_textio selected names

The proposed change has been incorporated.

ACTION: Update to resolved, fixed.

TOPIC: Bugz 237 Representation of negative time values with vhpiTimeT

The proposed change has been incorporated.

ACTION: Update to resolved, fixed.

TOPIC: Bugz 238 What is vhpiBootstrapFctT for in vhpi_user.h?

The proposed change has been incorporated.

ACTION: Update to resolved, fixed.

TOPIC: Chuck to update Bugzilla home page and eda.org mechanisms for new IRs

Nothing has been done to date. It was also noted that the Bugz data
base should be modified so that default permissions allow creating
Bugzs and adding comments, but not changing status.

ACTION: Chuck to implement.

TOPIC: Bugz 15   Should numeric_bit/std have resize with size_res parameter?

This has been implemented.

ACTION: Change status to verified, fixed.

TOPIC: Bugz 17   add_carry in numeric_std as well as fixed/floating packages

This should continue to be deferred.

ACTION: None.

TOPIC: Bugz 44   implicit operators and aliases

This has been resolved by IR 2099

ACTION: Change to verified, fixed.

TOPIC: Bugz 58  Wording problem with operator overloading

This should continue to be deferred.

ACTION: None.

TOPIC: Bugz 157   to_string in package standard

This should continue to be deferred.

ACTION: None.

TOPIC: Meeting time change

Because of a new job for Peter (congratulations) we need to change our
meeting times. The best consensus time is 7:00 AM Pacific. The next
meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, July 9. There is a potential conflict,
since there is an Accellera VHDL TC meeting scheduled for 8:00 AM.
However, this meeting has not been held recently.

ACTION: Chuck to contact Lance about scheduling conflict.

TOPIC: Nested comments

Several people thought that nested block comments would be useful and
not difficult to implement. However, since this issue was addressed in
the relevant IR and no one complained, the ISAC/LRM committee decided not
to raise the issue, but to address it only if someone else asked for that
change. Note added in editing: Chuck made the statement that adding
nested comments later would be backward compatible. That statement is not
quite true, since an embedded /* could cause problems. Here is an admittedly
bizarre example:

/* start of comment /* end of comment */
  x := 1;  --pretty strange example*/

With non-nested comments x is set to 1; with nested comments
x is not set.