Talk:Verilog
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Mostly a good writeup, with lots of great background info.
I have one big issue with it, though:
Why do folks always say that Verilog syntax is "reminiscent" of C? It looks, feels, and works almost nothing like C...
If you're comparing "VHDL vs. Verilog", it might be a workable analogy to say that's like "Pascal vs. C" in some ways, but that's where the similarity ends.
Sure, some of the statements like:
wire foo;
might look sort of like C (or a billion other languages that do declarations that way!) but most of verilog is nothing at all like C in syntax or feel.
And it's not just begin/end versus curly-braces...
function declaration is entirely different
switch statements use a totally different syntax and have different semantics
... and on and on ...
Also, the current text says that "it differs from C primarily in how the language represents literals and the ability to deal with time." Ignoring how the syntax is nothing at all like C except for begin statement-followed-by-semicolon, this completely discounts how verilog executes all top-level statements in *parallel*, which is one of the major features of any HDL.
Anyone else have an opinion on this? I've never met anyone who *actually* thought that writing verilog was anything like writing C. Everyone pretty much parrots that verilog is "C-like" or has "C-like syntax", but when you call them on it, nobody seems to really believe it or know where they original heard that from...
- I agree with you that Verilog bears only faint resemblance to C. According to what I've read, the authors of Verilog wanted a language that looked like C so it would be more familiar to engineers. It has the ternary operator, the basic math and logic operators, case sensitive variable names, and semicolon terminating (many) statements. But that's where the similarity ends. If they wanted to have it C-like they should have kept the curly brackets instead of using begin/end, kept the syntax of the switch statement, and made the declaration syntax more C like. --69.5.156.155 00:19, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)