[sv-cc] SV types that are not C compatible

Hi all,

Since SV development was being done by several groups working concurrently,
the DPI part has ended up partly out od sync with the rest of the language,
specifically with the new types thrown in.

Although DPI restricts the types of values that can be passed as arguments
through DPI, it does not explicitly address the types that can be contained
in unpacked structures.
We (or at least myself) used to think that any type is either a packed type
(with implementation specific representation) or a C compatible type.

LRM section E.6.3 "Data representation" implicitly implies such two categories
only: "SystemVerilog types that are not packed and that do not contained packed
elements have C compatible rep-resentation."

It says nothing about SV specific types that are not packed.

The same section explicitly specifies that an element of an unpacked array
should have the same representation as a standalone value.
The representation of a structure's member is not addressed at all, however.
I believe that it seemed "obvious" at the time, that any single value (i.e.
not an element of an unpacked array) of the same type should have the same
representation.

Thanks,
Andrzej
Received on Wed Oct 20 07:32:39 2004