[Oberon] What is the status of Lola-2 and its use in theFPGAversion ofProject Oberon?

[rochus.keller at bluewin.ch]

Thanks for your response which I appreciate.

> I wrap it in Verilog

How do you do that? By just using the Lola-2 to Verilog translated files in a Verilog project? Or by modifying the generated Verilog?

> I am really talking only about personal preferences.

Is it really primarily a question of preference, or are there important features in Verilog (besides underscores in names) which are not available in Lola-2?

> Verilog is used as a kind of intermediate language

I understand that and think it's a reasonable idea. But in a real-world FPGA project you usually have to use vendor provided modules or specific idioms in the Verilog code to achieve decent efficiency and performance. Verilog code without any vendor proprietary freatures tends to not optimally syntesize for all FPGAs. Thus my question.

> The original version of Lola compiled directly to a PAL fuse file or to 
> an early FPGA bitstream

Thanks for the links. As it seems they even had a simulator. Very impressive. Actually a Lola-2 to bitstream compiler would again be feasible today by re-using the https://github.com/cliffordwolf/icestorm and https://github.com/SymbiFlow toolchains. Yosys could be modified to accept Lola-2 input or the Lola-2 compiler could be extended to generate RTLIL. But of course this only makes sense if Lola-2 has enough expressiveness for a majority of real-world designs.

Best
R.