Subject: editorial suggestion regarding "integer"
From: Paul Graham (pgraham@cadence.com)
Date: Mon Apr 08 2002 - 18:46:03 PDT
It was pointed out at today's meeting that the use of the word "integer" to
denote a vector or scalar type is confusing, since there is a predefined
vector type called "integer". To add to the confusion, there are also
integer literals like 123. Type time is defined as a 64-bit integer. In
the section on enums, it is said that an enum can be cast to an integer
type, suggesting that an enum is itself not a integer type.
The nice thing about "integer" is that it is a compact way of saying "vector
or scalar". But it is alarmingly overloaded. That might be ok if we were
working on VHDL, but this is Verilog!
Any candidates for a better term than "integer" that we can use to refer to
a type which is a collection of individually addressible bits which can be
used as a whole in arithmetic and logical expressions? It's too bad that
"scalar" is already used for a single bit.
Paul
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