From distribution, July 1996:
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A VHDL frontend is now
available for non-commercial use at

    http://www-nt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/m_msipc/src/vaul.tar.gz

Please check it out and tell us what you think. More information about
MSIPC is available at

    http://www-nt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/m_msipc/Msipc.html

Here is the README

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This is a snapshot of the "vaul" library.

"Vaul" is cryptic for Vhdl Analyzer and Utility Library. It was written
at the University of Dortmund, Department for Electrical Engineering, AG
SIV, Heja BVB by Marius Vollmer <mvo@nt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de with
guidance from Ludwig Schwoerer <ls@nt.e-technik.uni.dortmund.de.

The library can be used to parse and analyze arbitrary VHDL code.  The
result is an abstract syntax graph, which is represented as a collection
of C++ objects, tightly connected by pointers. All names used in the VHDL
code have been resolved to their respective declarations (including
overloaded function names) and types have been checked (excluding subtype
constraints).

The internal representation of the syntax graph is automatically read
from and written to disk to implement the design library mechanisms of
VHDL.

It was written for a `selective VHDL to C compiler' that can translate a
synchronous subset of VHDL to C. Nevertheless, it is the goal of this
project to implement as much of VHDL as possible. The frontend should be
a big help to a wide variety of tools, that have to understand VHDL. A
few examples are: extraction of structural information, checking of
design rules, (partial) translation into other languages or
code-generation for a specific simulation kernel.

* STATUS (and plea for help)

This software is quite young and mostly untested. While it is used in a
system for very fast simulation of image processing circuits, it is not
very actively developed or maintained at the moment.

Don't expect the frontend to work for you right out of the box. If it
compiles at all, you are lucky. Many minor semantic checks are not done
or the details are probably incorrect.

So, we need your help! 

If you get it to compile, please notify us of all changes you had to
make. If you find incorrect behaviour of the analyzer, let us know.  In
general, don't hesitate telling us what you think.

But because we don't have the time or interest to address all the many,
many small and big problems that will arise, please try to solve them
yourself. Do tell us when you have fixed something, of course!

Send your suggestions and patches to <msipc@nt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de.

* CONTENTS

libvaulutil/
    This is a small library of misc. functions. Nothing specific
    to VHDL.

ctree/
    This is a tool for converting the concise node descriptions
    for the abstract syntax graph into C++ structs.

libvaul/
    This is the VHDL analyzer and design library manager. Included
    are two sample applications: the little library maintainance
    utility "vau" and the superficial translator from VHDL to pseudo C
    "v2c". There are also a few VHDL files for testing in vlib/.

    The `*.t' files are the node description for the abstract graph.

doc/
    Here is almost no documentation. There is stud.dvi, which is my
    "Studienarbeit" and the beginnings of a `Vaul Reference Manual',
    both in german.

* COMPILING

Basically, what you do with GNU packages:

    % configure
    % make

More complete instructions are in INSTALL.

You need GNU Make and probably GNU C++ (2.6.3 and up) and maybe some
other GNUish tools. It should compile at least on GNU/Linux, SunOS 4 and
5, maybe with some tweaking.

Ctree is not needed to succesfully build the two sample programs vau and
v2c. So if you can't get ctree to compile, go directly into libvaul/ and
continue there.

It is not necessary to install the package to run vau and v2c.

I really have no experience writing portable software. You are on your
own. Don't give up!

If you manage to compile the tools (or have downloaded one of the binary
distributions) read QUICKSTART to find out how to use them.

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