I kid, I kid. Does anyone still use that language? FYI: AHDL was (is?) a proprietary HDL language designed by Altera for use with their FPGA. I had to modify a design that used it once. It was aweful. I'm glad I've never had to use it again...
Anyway, I don't think it really matters what language you use to teach. According to the summary, this is a university (i.e. higher education) course, not some college training course. Teaching the proper hardware (ASIC, FPGA, whatever) design concepts should be your real challenge; what language you use to convey those concepts, to illustrate examples with, and require students to use in their assignments, projects and exams is (I would say) incidental. Maybe you should teach both, or hell, maybe you should teach only in AHDL and then require that your students use only VHDL or verilog for their assignments and projects (just kidding; that would be really evil).
In university, my work-terms, and for the first 4 years of my career, I only worked only in VHDL (and very briefly in AHDL), as that was the language my school and employers used (I'm in Waterloo ON, which appears to have sided with the US east coast, which traditionally has been VHDL). 6 yrs ago I started work at another company that used only verilog. Becoming proficient at writing verilog from scratch took a little while (a week or two, tops), but understanding (the gist of) designs written in verilog took no time at all. In the grand scheme of things, learning a new language if you already have a solid understanding of underlying design concepts is practically zero cost. All you need to make a quick transition is a decent reference book (or the internet) to look up syntax and concepts, a deliverable, and a looming deadline to get you motivated. That's all I needed, anyway; I certainly didn't need to take any verilog courses. I would almost say that it's a much bigger conceptual jump to move from coding for FPGAs to coding for ASICs then it is to jump from VHDL to verilog or vice versa.
So, personally, I would say that you shouldn't worry too much about the language, as that shouldn't be the primary focus of your course. It's definitely a required component to your course, but not the primary one. Concepts such as concurrent vs. sequential (processes), component inference vs instantiation, blocking vs non-blocking assignments, sequential vs combinatorial logic, zero-delay vs timing annotated simulation, synthesizable vs non-synthesizable logic, and a crap load of other digital design, simulation, synthesis, etc concepts are relevant in both languages and must be well understood before you can really be successful at designing with either of them.
Of course I haven't read TFA, but I can already tell they aren't taxing enough things to make their plan work. In my (fictional) dictatorship, if I wanted to reduce the fat index by way of a tax, I'd tax/outlaw the following things, at a minimum, before I'd touch games:
- Any food or snack with a positive calorie count (double tax for anything containing refined sugars or obscene amounts of fat) - Any drinks with added sugars, especially if it was bubbly or made by adding carbonated water to a syrup. - Chairs, benches, stools, ottomans or anywhere else you could possibly park that fat ass of yours on. Get up and move around, fatty! - Cars, motorcycles, boats, parachutes, public transportation, any form of transportation that uses gas, electricity, wind, hamsters or baby kitten blood to move. Possible tax break for modes of transportation that run off of mind power, âcause that's just cool. - Escalators, elevators, moving sidewalks (unless they were designed to move in the direction opposite of people using them). All tall buildings would have their elevator shafts converted to climbing walls instead. - So-called low-calory low-fat diet food (they're just an excuse for people to eat larger portions than they should be.) - TV, cable, PVRs, radio, DVDs (already mentioned in TFA, I know), movie theatres or anything else that encourages you to sit still while perhaps snacking - Touch-tone phones and cell phones would be outlawed, and rotary phones and cell phones would replace them. - Vacations, Christmas, Thanksgiving, long weekends or any other holiday or event where larger than normal quantities of food are consumed or below average energy is expanded - Double tax on Country music (has nothing to do with TFA, but what the hell, it's my fictional dictatorship and I can tax whatever the hell I want) - Power drills, saws, mixers, painters. Hell, power anything. If using it doesn't make you skinnier, it must be making you fatter, so lets tax it! - Work, unless your work requires that you expand a lot of energy. Office work would be double taxed. - Welfare, work layoffs, joblessness, disability, maternity leave, sabbaticals, work strikes, hospitalization or any other state of unemployment that's conducive to loafing - Waiting. That's right, waiting for anything, like a bus, plane, doctor's appointment, delivery, using the bathroom, etc would also be taxed, as would the person responsible for making you wait. Precious calorie burning time is being wasted every day while people wait for things. - Etc. I'm sure you get the picture.
I prefer the muriatic acid formatting approach myself. You know, just in case there are any confidential bits or bytes left in the drive's PCB traces or ICs, or sticking to the side walls of the platter enclosure. You can never be too careful....
I had the opportunity to use AIX or some other unix installation during my first work term in the spring of 95. I was blown away by how "awesome" the shell was (compared to DOS, the only other thing that I was used to) and how beautiful the screen savers were in X compared to windows (give me a break; I was 19 and new to the world of computers at the time). Then there were these things called "shell scripts", which really blew DOS batch scripts out of the water.
Anyway, when I returned to school the next term, somebody in my dorm told me about some free version of "unix" that I could download and install in my computer, which was a raging fast 486-66 DX2. Apparently it even had X and all of the screensavers. It took 20+ diskettes and a long session using "gopher" at my university's computer lab before I was ready to install my first Linux distribution: Slackware. Installation was long, arduous, and confusing (what the hell were all of these packages?). Getting X to run took weeks to figure out, and in the end I think I had to re-install everything from scratch again. Ah, those were the days...
Anyway, using and installing Linux has become a lot easier since then...
1 hour spent on video gaming is easy to recover -- do the homework tomorrow.
£300 lost in a bet is a week's wages gone.
No worries, I'm getting paid today! I'll just "recover" last week's pay and the pay from the week before that by playing a bit of online poker. I'm really feeling lucky this time! Things are going to turn around... I can *feel* it!
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I kid, I kid. Does anyone still use that language? FYI: AHDL was (is?) a proprietary HDL language designed by Altera for use with their FPGA. I had to modify a design that used it once. It was aweful. I'm glad I've never had to use it again...
Anyway, I don't think it really matters what language you use to teach. According to the summary, this is a university (i.e. higher education) course, not some college training course. Teaching the proper hardware (ASIC, FPGA, whatever) design concepts should be your real challenge; what language you use to convey those concepts, to illustrate examples with, and require students to use in their assignments, projects and exams is (I would say) incidental. Maybe you should teach both, or hell, maybe you should teach only in AHDL and then require that your students use only VHDL or verilog for their assignments and projects (just kidding; that would be really evil).
In university, my work-terms, and for the first 4 years of my career, I only worked only in VHDL (and very briefly in AHDL), as that was the language my school and employers used (I'm in Waterloo ON, which appears to have sided with the US east coast, which traditionally has been VHDL). 6 yrs ago I started work at another company that used only verilog. Becoming proficient at writing verilog from scratch took a little while (a week or two, tops), but understanding (the gist of) designs written in verilog took no time at all. In the grand scheme of things, learning a new language if you already have a solid understanding of underlying design concepts is practically zero cost. All you need to make a quick transition is a decent reference book (or the internet) to look up syntax and concepts, a deliverable, and a looming deadline to get you motivated. That's all I needed, anyway; I certainly didn't need to take any verilog courses. I would almost say that it's a much bigger conceptual jump to move from coding for FPGAs to coding for ASICs then it is to jump from VHDL to verilog or vice versa.
So, personally, I would say that you shouldn't worry too much about the language, as that shouldn't be the primary focus of your course. It's definitely a required component to your course, but not the primary one. Concepts such as concurrent vs. sequential (processes), component inference vs instantiation, blocking vs non-blocking assignments, sequential vs combinatorial logic, zero-delay vs timing annotated simulation, synthesizable vs non-synthesizable logic, and a crap load of other digital design, simulation, synthesis, etc concepts are relevant in both languages and must be well understood before you can really be successful at designing with either of them.
Of course I haven't read TFA, but I can already tell they aren't taxing enough things to make their plan work. In my (fictional) dictatorship, if I wanted to reduce the fat index by way of a tax, I'd tax/outlaw the following things, at a minimum, before I'd touch games:
- Any food or snack with a positive calorie count (double tax for anything containing refined sugars or obscene amounts of fat)
- Any drinks with added sugars, especially if it was bubbly or made by adding carbonated water to a syrup.
- Chairs, benches, stools, ottomans or anywhere else you could possibly park that fat ass of yours on. Get up and move around, fatty!
- Cars, motorcycles, boats, parachutes, public transportation, any form of transportation that uses gas, electricity, wind, hamsters or baby kitten blood to move. Possible tax break for modes of transportation that run off of mind power, âcause that's just cool.
- Escalators, elevators, moving sidewalks (unless they were designed to move in the direction opposite of people using them). All tall buildings would have their elevator shafts converted to climbing walls instead.
- So-called low-calory low-fat diet food (they're just an excuse for people to eat larger portions than they should be.)
- TV, cable, PVRs, radio, DVDs (already mentioned in TFA, I know), movie theatres or anything else that encourages you to sit still while perhaps snacking
- Touch-tone phones and cell phones would be outlawed, and rotary phones and cell phones would replace them.
- Vacations, Christmas, Thanksgiving, long weekends or any other holiday or event where larger than normal quantities of food are consumed or below average energy is expanded
- Double tax on Country music (has nothing to do with TFA, but what the hell, it's my fictional dictatorship and I can tax whatever the hell I want)
- Power drills, saws, mixers, painters. Hell, power anything. If using it doesn't make you skinnier, it must be making you fatter, so lets tax it!
- Work, unless your work requires that you expand a lot of energy. Office work would be double taxed.
- Welfare, work layoffs, joblessness, disability, maternity leave, sabbaticals, work strikes, hospitalization or any other state of unemployment that's conducive to loafing
- Waiting. That's right, waiting for anything, like a bus, plane, doctor's appointment, delivery, using the bathroom, etc would also be taxed, as would the person responsible for making you wait. Precious calorie burning time is being wasted every day while people wait for things.
- Etc. I'm sure you get the picture.
... but I guess it's a little too late now. Oh well, better luck next time.
I prefer the muriatic acid formatting approach myself. You know, just in case there are any confidential bits or bytes left in the drive's PCB traces or ICs, or sticking to the side walls of the platter enclosure. You can never be too careful....
I had the opportunity to use AIX or some other unix installation during my first work term in the spring of 95. I was blown away by how "awesome" the shell was (compared to DOS, the only other thing that I was used to) and how beautiful the screen savers were in X compared to windows (give me a break; I was 19 and new to the world of computers at the time). Then there were these things called "shell scripts", which really blew DOS batch scripts out of the water.
Anyway, when I returned to school the next term, somebody in my dorm told me about some free version of "unix" that I could download and install in my computer, which was a raging fast 486-66 DX2. Apparently it even had X and all of the screensavers. It took 20+ diskettes and a long session using "gopher" at my university's computer lab before I was ready to install my first Linux distribution: Slackware. Installation was long, arduous, and confusing (what the hell were all of these packages?). Getting X to run took weeks to figure out, and in the end I think I had to re-install everything from scratch again. Ah, those were the days...
Anyway, using and installing Linux has become a lot easier since then...
No worries, I'm getting paid today! I'll just "recover" last week's pay and the pay from the week before that by playing a bit of online poker. I'm really feeling lucky this time! Things are going to turn around... I can *feel* it!
v, V and ctrl-V (various visual selection modes for copy-paste)
zf, zo, zc: fold creation, open, close (hides sections of your code)
~: (toggle case)
u, ctrl-r: undo, redo
"vimdiff" or "vim -d": (visual diff of two files)
If my dog ran like Vista I'd probably euthanize it to put it out of its misery