Dependencies

Any complex design will involve a large number of ACT files and namespaces. For a hierarchical design with many imported libraries, it is useful to be able to determine dependency information and see if all the libraries are present in the directories where ACT can find them. The command adepend is used to check dependencies.

For C/C++ programs, many systems have the utility makedepend that generates a list of dependencies for each file in a syntax that can readily integrated into a Makefile. ACT provides adepend for the same functionality. For example, running it on the adder8b.act example would have the following result:

$ adepend adder8b.act
adder8b.act:  adder.act   gates.act

Here, running adepend on adderb8.act shows that it depends on the adder.act and gates.act.