"once" assigment in Python

[Lorenzo Di Gregorio]

Thank you very much for your suggestions!
I'll try in the next days to elaborate a bit on the last two ones.

By the way, the "once" assignment is not that evil if you use it for
hardware modeling.
Most hardware models look like:

wire1 = function()
instance component(input=wire1,output=wire2)
result = function(wire2)

When employing Python it's pretty straightforward to translate the
instance to an object.

instance = Component(input=wire1,output=wire2)

Then you don't use "instance" *almost* anymore: it's an object which
gets registered with the simulator kernel and gets called by reference
and event-driven only by the simulator kernel.  We might reuse the
name for calling some administrative methods related to the instance
(e.g. for reporting) but that's a pretty safe thing to do.  Of course
all this can be done during initialization, but there are some good
reasons (see Verilog vs VHDL) why it's handy do be able to do it
*anywhere*.  The annoying problem was that every time the program flow
goes over the assignment, the object gets recreated.

Indeed Python itself is not a hardware modeling language, but I built
some infrastructure to fill what I was missing and for quickly
building up a functional prototype and testing some ideas Python is
really excellent.

Best Regards,
Lorenzo