The behavior of these format specifiers is highly specific to Verilog
(`$time` and `$realtime` are only defined relative to `$timescale`)
and may not fit other languages well, if at all. If they choose to use
it, it is now clear what they are opting into.
This commit also simplifies the CXXRTL code generation for these format
specifiers.
This commit achieves three roughly equally important goals:
1. To bring the rendering code in kernel/fmt.cc and in cxxrtl.h as close
together as possible, with an ideal of only having the bigint library
as the difference between the render functions.
2. To make the treatment of `$time` and `$realtime` in CXXRTL closer to
the Verilog semantics, at least in the formatting code.
3. To change the code generator so that all of the `$print`-to-`string`
conversion code is contained inside of a closure.
There are two reasons to aim for goal (3):
a. Because output redirection through definition of a global ostream
object is neither convenient nor useful for environments where
the output is consumed by other code rather than being printed on
a terminal.
b. Because it may be desirable to, in some cases, ignore the `$print`
cells that are present in the netlist based on a runtime decision.
This is doubly true for an upcoming `$check` cell implementing
assertions, since failing a `$check` would by default cause a crash.
Removing some signed checks and logic where we've already guaranteed the
values to be positive. Indeed, in these cases, if a negative value got
through (per my realisation in the signed fuzz harness), it would cause
an infinite loop due to flooring division.
e.g. `$displayh(8'ha)` won't have a padding set, because it just gets
`lzero` set instead by `compute_required_decimal_places`.
It also doesn't have a width. In this case, we can just fill in a dummy
(unused) padding. Either space or zero would work, but space is a bit
more distinct given the width field follows.
Also omit writing the width if it's zero. This makes the emitted ilang
a little cleaner in places; `{8:> h0u}` is the output for this example,
now. The other possible extreme would be `{8:>00h0u}`.
For input like "{", "{1", etc., we would exit the loop due to
`i < fmt.size()` no longer being the case, and then check if
`++i == fmt.size()`. That would increment i to `fmt.size() + 1`,
and so execution continues.
The intention is to move i beyond the ':', so we do it only in that
case instead.
Catherine
Martin Povišer
gatecat
Charlotte