Re: Any Hardware/EDA engineers out there?

On Apr  4, Jim Freeze wrote:
> On Friday,  4 April 2003 at  2:03:50 +0900, Brett H. Williams wrote:
> > At this time, though, I don't think I'm at liberty to share any of it.  Hmmm...
> > we do have some simple utilities to parse and communicate with Tcl (so many CAD
> > tools use Tcl).  I think that could be shared, and we've found it quite useful
> > despite its simplicity.
> 
> 
> Please share
> 

Why not? (attached) It just adds a few things to the Tk* modules, as it seems
some of the useful things in them are private.

This is primarily used to have tcl configuration files for our Ruby-based CAD
tools.  So it is not terribly complex.

I must make an obligatory disclaimer:  I didn't write any of this, coworkers
Craig Files and John Bratt did (hence the mix of styles).  Perhaps if this is
useful to others it could be extended, cleaned up, and made even more useful.

A little example of one way we'd use this, rather neutered:

def ScanPlan.readCommandsFile(filename, scanplan)
  # create a class object so it can be reached outside the scope of an
  # individual object (how it has to be done with Tcl)
  @@current_scanplan = scanplan
  # Next, set up tcl configuration commands
  tcl_code = <<-EOC
    proc set_constraint {scantype param_name param_value} {
      ruby "ScanPlan.sp_set_param('$scantype','$param_name','$param_value')"
      return "$scantype"
    }
    # put in any other tcl code you want here... if long could certainly
    # be read in from a file instead
  EOC
  TclUtils.eval(tcl_code)
  TclUtils.load_file(filename)
  error = TclUtils.fetchValue("errorInfo")
  # If load_file had errors, it will print to stderr the error, but nothing
  # will actually stop our current process.
  raise "Reading tcl file #{filename} generated errors." unless error.empty?
  @@current_scanplan = nil
end

# This is the ruby method that is called by the tcl procedure set_constraint
# In such methods we may need to access the class variable which gives
# us some context (this tools does things recursively, including reading 
# multiple tcl configuration file for a given level of hierarchy)
def ScanPlan.sp_set_param(scantype, param_name, param_value)
  ScanPlan.checkNewParam(scantype,param_name,param_value) 
  ScanPlan[scantype,param_name] = param_value
  return param_value
end


Note that the same restrictions in communication to and from Tcl apply as when
using the Tk modules--make sure each tcl proc and each Ruby method that cross
the Tcl/Ruby boundary returns a string and nothing but a string.

-- 
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Brett Williams                                 | [phone]        
Agilent Technologies                           | [e-mail]
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