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Procedure and Function
- Thread starter fzack
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From Ashenden "The Designer's guide to VHDL" :
The difference between the two is that a procedure encapsulates a collection of sequential statements that are executed for their effect, whereas a function encapsulates a collection of statements that compute a result. Thus a procedure is a generalization of a statement, whereas a function is a generalization of an expression.
In other words the function is more generalized, but really to my mind that makes it about the same as a parameterized procedure. Maybe someone else could give a better explanation.
as far as synthesis goes, it probably depends on what is in your function/procedure. But, given that a function is more generalized I would have to say that it is more likely to create similar chunks of logic whenever used, but a procedure is more likely to create one chunk of logic that is used in multiple places. But again, that would depend on what code is in the procedure/function and also where it is used.
Im sure I could write code that would produce the opposite of what I just said, so that is not a hard an fast rule. Given that, I don't really see much of a difference between the two except for yourself (and future users of your code) to understand that one is a more general than the other.
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The difference between the two is that a procedure encapsulates a collection of sequential statements that are executed for their effect, whereas a function encapsulates a collection of statements that compute a result. Thus a procedure is a generalization of a statement, whereas a function is a generalization of an expression.
In other words the function is more generalized, but really to my mind that makes it about the same as a parameterized procedure. Maybe someone else could give a better explanation.
as far as synthesis goes, it probably depends on what is in your function/procedure. But, given that a function is more generalized I would have to say that it is more likely to create similar chunks of logic whenever used, but a procedure is more likely to create one chunk of logic that is used in multiple places. But again, that would depend on what code is in the procedure/function and also where it is used.
Im sure I could write code that would produce the opposite of what I just said, so that is not a hard an fast rule. Given that, I don't really see much of a difference between the two except for yourself (and future users of your code) to understand that one is a more general than the other.
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