The Assignment Statement in Hardware Description Languages

The basic character of a programming language or a hardware design language is determined by the data types on which it operates and how changes in their values are made. Few of the papers on specific hardware design languages have included a discussion of this basic part, of the languages' semantics. Often a heuristic discussion based on examples is taken as the most rapid way of conveying the flavor of a new language. Since the range of language applications is often limited by the available data types and the transformations which may be applied to them, a careful analysis of this area of language structure is essential. It is not the intent of this paper to define another hardware description language. Instead, we want to propose a basic set of data types and assignment statements which should be available in any general-purpose hardware description language.