Cyclicity CDL Language Specification - Discussion

This section moves on from the detailed grammar description to talk in more human terms about the concepts and capabilities of the elements of the language.

This section looks at Cyclicity CDL's types from a more human perspective.

CDL types are a tool for abstracting from simple bit vectors or collections of bit vectors to a higher level. They are a basic tenet of all modern languages, and certainly an assist even for hardware description languages; VHDL and SystemVerilog support them, for example.

The types in CDL have a range of abilities and restrictions:

1. CDL's types are defined to be fully known at compile-time, to allow for compile-time type checking.

2. CDL's types are basically driven from some very simple basic types, and CDL does not support the plethora of types that, for example, SystemVerilog does; CDL's basic types are focussed on producing working hardware descriptions, not on testbench code.

3. CDL supports structures, which are collections of other types. These allow, for example, a single variable to contain a set of flags and data, without requiring individual variables for each.

4. CDL supports enumerations; these