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Re: Next Big Thing

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On 8/16/2011 11:19 PM, Terje Mathisen wrote:
> Andy "Krazy" Glew wrote:
>> I have already talked about how, back when I was an undergrad Programmer
>> on Duty, I would teach people to use a concurrent assignment construct
> [snip]
>>
>> This is exactly the sort of thing that people used to hardware languages
>> are used to doing.
>
> Working in hw, it seems kind of obvious that you are working with
> wavefronts (clock signals and data) passing over all your various
> resources; programming then becomes the problem of getting as much use
> out of them as possible, while the usual multithreaded problem of
> synchronization sort of goes away.
>
> Is this the right way to think about it?
>
> Terje


Well, it's not the way I think about it, at higher levels of abstraction.

At a high level, I just try to think about outputs, and inputs, and 
expressing the outputs in terms of the inputs - even if some of the 
outputs and inputs are the same locations.  I'm always thinking 
NEW(variables) = f( OLD(variables) ).  Written in a way so that the 
order of evaluation does not matter.

Now, this is very much equivalent to saying something like ON RISING 
EDGE.  But I try to think in terms of as few such "clock edges" as 
possible, ideally only one.

Adding clock edges is like adding serialized Von Neumann state: it is an 
opportunity for bugs to arise.  Only do that when you get down to 
implementation.

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Next Big Thing kenney@cix.compulink.co.uk - 2011-08-16 09:47 -0500
  Re: Next Big Thing Stephen Fuld <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> - 2011-08-16 08:24 -0700
    Re: Next Big Thing Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> - 2011-08-16 08:51 -0700
      Re: Next Big Thing MitchAlsup <MitchAlsup@aol.com> - 2011-08-16 12:17 -0700
        Re: Next Big Thing "Andy \"Krazy\" Glew" <andy@SPAM.comp-arch.net> - 2011-08-16 18:00 -0700
          Re: Next Big Thing Terje Mathisen <"terje.mathisen at tmsw.no"> - 2011-08-17 08:19 +0200
            Re: Next Big Thing Colin Paul Gloster <Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org> - 2011-08-17 12:40 +0000
            Re: Next Big Thing "Andy \"Krazy\" Glew" <andy@SPAM.comp-arch.net> - 2011-08-17 08:20 -0700
              Re: Next Big Thing MitchAlsup <MitchAlsup@aol.com> - 2011-08-17 10:43 -0700
                Re: Next Big Thing nmm1@cam.ac.uk - 2011-08-17 18:19 +0100
                Re: Next Big Thing "Andy \"Krazy\" Glew" <andy@SPAM.comp-arch.net> - 2011-08-17 23:39 -0700
                Re: Next Big Thing nmm1@cam.ac.uk - 2011-08-18 07:27 +0100
  Re: Next Big Thing torbenm@diku.dk (Torben Ægidius Mogensen) - 2011-08-17 10:49 +0200
    Re: Next Big Thing Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> - 2011-08-17 05:37 -0700
  Re: Next Big Thing mac <acolvin@efunct.com> - 2011-08-18 22:23 +0000
  Re: Next Big Thing Morten Reistad <first@last.name> - 2011-08-24 20:44 +0200
    Re: Next Big Thing nmm1@cam.ac.uk - 2011-08-24 20:23 +0100

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