This is an overly simplistic criticism of the tax system that indicates a poor understanding of many of the issues involved. Multi-national (and even just multi-state) companies have a variety of complications and neither the states nor the companies themselves have clear answers to all of them.

For example, what if you do all of your R&D in South Dakota, then pack up and ship all your product from North Dakota, but California sales reps account for 95% of your revenue? Where did you "earn money" that you "pay a percentage to the government" ?

Municipals compete for corporate nexus by providing tax incentives and for good reason. Here in Oregon, most folks pay about 10% in income taxes. That means that for every $1M in wages that a company pays to the employees that end up coming to Oregon, the state gets $100k in income tax revenue. Not to mention the other revenue-generation activities such as real-estate taxes.

You haven't met enough pilots.

Sorry, you cannot do 3D anaglyphics with a rolling shutter.

Just leave it alone.

If you're really itching, hook it up to some broadband interference generator. That'll really mess with the feds.

What this should have taught you was to use simulation.

Yes, this is legal in Verilog and not in VHDL.

But is it the compiler's job to teach the student?

The two frameworks have equivalent issues here. Verilog just doesn't warn you about the type issues. But VHDL requires that you go through hoops to solve them. They BOTH require some level of understanding to solve the problem. That's where the instructor comes into it.

Nonsense. Teaching the tool is the job of a vocational program. The theory of HDL will long out-last any particular errors or syntax that come about.

Any course that targets a specific tool moves from being a life-long asset to being an educational experience that lasts only as long as those tools or languages are in-style.

An HDL course should focus on the theory and practice of HDL. The choice of which HDL to use should be made based on which tool allows you to accomplish that goal as well as possible. The widespread use of both Verilog and VHDL make them good choices. But (I feel) that for most fundamental classes, VHDL involves too much unnecessary verbosity.

In more advanced HDL work, VHDL begins to offer more. But with Verilog-2001, still not quite enough.

Well, if I have to spell it out for you, "more familiar" is meant to mean "statistically more familiar" since the vast majority of people learning HDL come from a C/Java/C# background in some manner. VERY few people have familiarity with Pascal and even fewer with ADA.

If taught right, the "appears like C" doesn't involve a catch at all. (and by your argument, the fact that VHDL appears like Pascal would involve the same catch) HDLs are hardware description languages. It is extremely important to make that distinction early on. The appearance of an HDL like a procedural language is not a catch if taught in proper context. But this is the task of the instructor and is not associated with the particular HDL chosen.

Strongly disagree here.

You can do about 99% of what most HDL folks do for FPGAs using Verilog and VHDL. Verilog does it in a more familiar syntax. VHDL requires considerably more pomp and fluff to accomplish the same goals.

It's true that VHDL *may* be more appropriate for bigger, careful projects. But students need to learn principles without tools and other things getting in the way.

Teach principles of HDL with the least roadblocks, then allow more in-depth study to accomplish more. The relatively few students that go on to use what they learn in a class in depth will learn as necessary. If you can get through to ALL of the students using simple tools and languages, then you can teach the fundamentals of HDL and that will stick with them for a long time to come.

Actually, I'm convinced SAP saves big companies millions of dollars. They do so by losing invoices or making it so difficult for other companies to invoice them that these invoices never get paid. Companies using SAP have much higher payment aging than other companies.