[Python-ideas] Operator as first class citizens -- like in scala -- or yet another new operator?

[Yanghao Hua]

> You do realise that repeatedly avoiding the question "what problem do
> you think you are solving?" does not convincingly make the case that
> there is a problem to be solved, don't you?

It might be that I am not good enough yet to present it in a way for
some of you to better comprehend it. But I do see positive feedbacks
too. I plan to stop this discussion here and make a toe-to-toe
comparison how it looks like without assignment overloading, how it
looks like with assignment overloading, and how it compares with other
languages like verilog and Scala/Chisel, and in the meantime to look
into some corner cases to make sure the proposed solution can cover
all situations.

To repeat what the problem do I think I am solving? A variable, that
behaves like an integer (e.g. all normal integer ops should just
work), but has a different assignment behavior, such that it can be
used to develop equally good hardware descriptions. And why bother
using Python to design hardware? Because the problem of hardware is
not the design of hardware itself, 60% to 80% of the effort is on
verification. Many python verification framework exists (cocotb,
myhdl, and my own) which has proven to be very useful when verifying
hardware. If the last mile which is to describe hardware directly in
python (has to be equally good and intuitive and char-conservative as
in verilog or chisel), then I can throw away thousands of lines of
interfacing code that bridges verilog and python, and has a long term
possibility to optimize its speed by using pypy.

No decorators for end user, no forced coroutines for end user, almost
native *simple* python syntax, is the only possible way I see to
attract real hardware developers (like Chisel).