Specman Secrets – Inline Text Expansion

Even though ‘e’ language documentation is quite well written, there are still some stuff either not described in the specifications, or described in just a few words. That’s a pity since, over time, I found out a lot of useful undocumented features of ‘e’ language.

The first one that I want to share with you is described with just a couple of words as “Inline Text Expansion”.

It allows you to write a string on multiple lines without any backslash (\) and it allows you to insert values in the string directly.

Here is an example:


var my_number : uint = 10;
var my_strings : list of string = << #: this is the first line my number is <(my_number)>
end #;
print my_strings;
The output for this code is this:

this is the first line
my number is 10

Pretty cool, right?
You are probably thinking: where in the hell will I make use of this?
Well, the only place I found this very useful is when I had to build macros “as computed”. It makes the macro definition much more readable:

define "set_data_width in to " as computed {
return str_join(<< #: { extend <(str_upper())>_DEFAULT cfs_<(str_lower())>_agent_config {
keep data_width == <()>;
};
};
end #, "");
};
Calling the macro will look like this:

set_data_width in APB to 16;
set_data_width in AXI to 32;
The resulting code will be:
extend APB_DEFAULT cfs_apb_agent_config {
keep data_width == 16;
};

extend AXI_DEFAULT cfs_axi_agent_config {
keep data_width == 32;
};

Hope you found this useful!

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