[sv-ec] RE: soft constraint proposal

Arturo,

I have received some comments/issues from our randomization experts this morning.
Could you reply to these comments and I will forward them immediately.

Thanks

Hi Francoise.

I have some questions:

"disable soft constraint_primary" is used to disable previous soft constraints on that variable. If the soft constraint has multiple variables, is it disabled or not? If those other variables are state variables vs rand variables vs rand variables which are temporarily state variables? The text seems to imply that only soft constraints on the single named variable are disabled.

Is this legal?

constraint c1 { if ( a < b ) then soft b < 20;

else if ( a > b ) then soft b > 20;

else soft b < 20; }

If it is (BNF implies this) then does this mean we cannot treat the two copies of "b < 20" as common subexpressions? Are there really three soft constraints here, with well-defined priority? Currently we treat this as a single constraint expression across the RNC interface.

What is a "soft" dist constraint? If it is part of a conflict, I assume we ignore it altogether, not just the weight expressions (some of which may be zero and thus cause the contradiction).

If a soft constraint contains a function call which causes it to be difficult to solve (but to the user has an obvious solution) are we allowed to fail, or do we discard that soft constraint after some amount of effort?

-- Petr

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