The ACT Language

This document describes the language used by the Asynchronous Circuit Toolkit (ACT).

• Introduction: A brief introduction to the circuit description language, including some simple examples.
• Types
  • Basic types: The care and feeding of basic type definitions and arrays.
  • User defined types: Defining processes, data types, and channels.
  • Implementation relation: The implementation relation and re-using parts of types.
  • Constructors for types: Implementing types using other types
• Connections: Wires, connections, aliasing and initialization of meta parameters.
• Expressions: The syntax of expressions, including defining functions in ACT as well as externally defined functions.
• Control Flow: Looping and IF constructs for circuit construction.
• Debugging Support: Assertions and logging
• Namespaces: The care and feeding of namespaces.
• Sublanguages: Various hardware description sub-languages within ACT, including CHP, PRS, and HSE.
• Attributes: Attributes associated with instances as well as the production rule sublanguage.

The ACT parser understands the #line directives from the C pre-processor. Files that include C macros normally use the .actx extension.