Re: [Gnucap-devel] Fwd: [Help-gnucap] inline comment delimiter

[al davis]

On Tuesday 15 September 2009, address@hidden wrote:
> Here's a thread that started out on gnucap-help:
> 
> What is the inline comment delimiter in gnucap,

It depends on the language plugin, but mostly it doesn't work.  
Let's fix it now.

Gnucap accepts several different simulation languages.  What is 
the comment delimiter should depend on what language you are 
using.

> and what
>  should it be?

With the language plugins, it is possible to have exact 
compatibility with most other simulators, even the different 
incompatible versions of Spice.

As it stands, compatibility isn't perfect, but Hspice and Eldo 
have been treated as the "spice" versions for which the highest 
compatibility is desired.

> According to the manual for V0.35, the delimiter is quote. 
>  It doesn't say whether that is single quote or double quote.

That's unclear. .. The manual is being rewritten completely.  
The new version is on the wiki at:
http://gnucap.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=gnucap:manual

> From experiment, it seems that ' starts a comment on my
> lines, but " starts a comment on a .SUBCKT line.  

Several characters are accepted to start whole-line comments, 
going back a long time when different versions of spice used 
different characters.  Since there was no standard, accept all 
of them.

I think it has converged to "*".  Correct me if I am wrong.

It is easy to change it to just about anything.  So, since the 
example is Spice format ..  What do the different versions of 
Spice do?

(Hspice, Pspice, NGspice, LTspice, Eldo, Multi-sim, Smart-spice, 
.....)

There is another issue now ...  You can have parameter 
expressions.  It looks like Hspice and Eldo want them in single 
quotes.  Pspice appears to want curly braces.  What else is 
there?

Another comment issue is how comments mix with extension lines.  
It seems to be different in different simulators.