Saturday, February 28, 2004
Actually I'm not at all surprised by my fellow Alex's assessment of for loops, because in the electrical engineering / circuit design world, timing is absolutely critical. So if I define a loop in VHDL, I have to know how many clock cycles it will take to execute. If a 'for' loop has a predictable execution that's not a problem, but if you're screwing with the index variable or whatever that makes this task much more difficult.
As far as software is concerned as long as you leave the index variable alone (i.e., don't change it) then I have few problems with creative use of for loops, but in hardware that's a definite no-no.
