[Libre-soc-dev] svp64

[Cole Poirier]

On Wednesday, December 16, 2020, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net>
wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 10:13 AM Cole Poirier <colepoirier at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Oof. I appreciate the difficulty of dyslexia. I also think that there’s
> an
> > important reason Jacob chose this naming scheme instead of using the
> > existing one. Perhaps he can come up with way to write it that interferes
> > less with your dyslexia, but still keeps the indication that this is a
> > novel future expansion enabled naming scheme?
>
> if it was expressed in bit-form as e.g. a VHDL or v3.0B Pseudo-code
> expression, "SVname = RA || EXTRA[0] | 0b0" i would have absolutely no
> problem whatsoever.  the massive tables however are almost completely
> incomprehensible to me.
>
> i look at the table and it's as if i can't see it.  due to its size* i
> can't make the connection between the names and the linear SRAM... and
> then the inversion of the order of the names - XXX_NN_MM - that NN
> increments before MM - this third dimension, i can't handle it.


Ok cool, that seems like a good ‘compromise’ to me. Will that work Jacob?


> > > to interpret
> > > the names.  the old SVPrefix meaning which referred to bits was dead
> > > easy.
> > >
> > > * reduction of table names by reducing verbosity of descriptions.  i
> > > use a very small screen for viewing the wiki pages: editing and just
> > > reviewing is a pain.  the more words, the harder it is to understand.
> >
> >
> > As you’ve mentioned previously, writing concise descriptions is harder
> than
> > writing verbose ones. Could an interim solution be a short description
> with
> > some kind of footnotes? Additionally, in the case where names of things
> > become too long, abbreviations and a glossary could be used to cut down
> on
> > the horizontal length of the tables.
>
> we've a glossary somewhere.
>
> https://git.libre-soc.org/?p=libresoc-isa-manual.git;a=
> blob;f=powerpc-add/src/glossary.tex;hb=HEAD
>

Yes, I meant a small ‘glossary’ below the table such that names can be
shortened in the table but the full context is literally right below it so
reference to it is near instantaneous instead of a context switch. Also
it’s not meant to be a glossary of the general terms to much as a map
between shortened names for compactness benefit on the page, and the long
full names, especially in the case of the names that are more than... 5
characters? Not sure if that’s around the right soft cutoff point, but
essentially it’s clear that the more compact the tables are the easier it
will be for you, and this can be accomplished quite effectively through
using short names in the table and having a short name to long name map
below the table.

Cole