3 ms·

From the wiki article: > The synchronous abstraction makes reasoning about time in a synchronous program a lot easier, thanks to the notion of logical ticks: a

From the wiki article: > The synchronous abstraction makes reasoning about time in a synchronous program a lot easier, thanks to the notion of logical ticks: a synchronous program reacts to its environment in a sequence of ticks, and computations within a tick are assumed to be instantaneous, I wouldn't classify HDLs as synchronous or reactive programming explicitly because the last assumption in the quote (instantaneous ticks) is emphatically false when doing HDL programming. Synchronous programming (as with FRP systems in haskell, usage of mobx or Vue in javascript, or other such libraries) affords the programmer this tick based Excel-like approach to expressing cause-effect chains. You really can't do this in, say, Verilog if you want a functioning program.

anewhnaccount2 9y ago
You can definitely argue the toss about paradigms, since things tend to kind of overlap and blur into each other unless you're careful. It's true, if you want a synthesisable design you need to meet timing. However, once you meet timing you can assume your ticks are instantaneous. I would argue that for me, there is still a somewhat similar feel to the parts of HDL that don't feel like hardware design e.g. creating pipelines. This is a limitation of hardware rather than the programming language per-se. This type of imprecision seems common when talking of programming (language) paradigms: are they based on languages in an idealised world, execution environments, language ecosystems, APIs exposed by the operating system? We can only really talk about them in an exact sense when we work in an artificial environment as in Roy and Haridi. Given the inherent imprecision, I don't see why when we deal with real systems, we shouldn't bend definitions a little bit and say a language "sort-of" or "mostly" exhibits a certain paradigm.
- banachtarski 9y ago
  Maybe "pipeline programming" is a pretty apt description. But to your point, you could argue that VHDL and Verilog are just bad synchronous programming languages haha.

anewhnaccount2 9y ago

You can definitely argue the toss about paradigms, since things tend to kind of overlap and blur into each other unless you're careful. It's true, if you want a synthesisable design you need to meet timing. However, once you meet timing you can assume your ticks are instantaneous. I would argue that for me, there is still a somewhat similar feel to the parts of HDL that don't feel like hardware design e.g. creating pipelines. This is a limitation of hardware rather than the programming language per-se. This type of imprecision seems common when talking of programming (language) paradigms: are they based on languages in an idealised world, execution environments, language ecosystems, APIs exposed by the operating system? We can only really talk about them in an exact sense when we work in an artificial environment as in Roy and Haridi. Given the inherent imprecision, I don't see why when we deal with real systems, we shouldn't bend definitions a little bit and say a language "sort-of" or "mostly" exhibits a certain paradigm.

banachtarski 9y ago
Maybe "pipeline programming" is a pretty apt description. But to your point, you could argue that VHDL and Verilog are just bad synchronous programming languages haha.