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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I designed the ABEL language back in the 80's for compiling designs targeted at programmable logic arrays and gate arrays. It was very successful, but it died after a decade or so.

It'd probably be around today and up to date if it was open source. A shame it isn't. I don't even know who owns the rights to it these days, or if whoever owns it even knows they have the rights to it, due to spinoffs and mergers.

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I think you'd be surprised. I went to Caltech (graduated 2014), which is a fairly well known university for their Electrical Engineering program, and I learned ABEL in my Sophomore/Junior year. My instructor, an admittedly old school hardware engineer, was in love with the language and had it as part of our upper level digital design curriculum for a few labs. FWIW, I think it was super intuitive and a hugely valuable learning tool. I suppose that doesn't mean it isn't "dead" for professional purposes, though.

Thanks very much for the kind words!

Perhaps you can ask the professor for who has the copyright on ABEL now? So we can ask the holder if it can be open sourced.

Miracles like this do happen - last year Symantec allowed the Symantec C++ compiler to be fully open sourced!

Walter - appears Xilinx are the current copyright holder and ABEL was last supported in the XILINX 10.1 ISE toolset released circa 2008 (Current release is 14.7). Introductory guide can still be found here: https://bit.ly/2NfkLWq

This is the URL behind the shortened link:

https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/sw_manuals/xili...

Thanks, I'll contact them and see what they have to say.

Was it with Glen George?

But academia is not the professional world, it's the opposite...

It was very successful, but it died after a decade or so.

Perhaps not entirely. We had one lab session dedicated to it during my junior year in college. That was ten years ago but apparently they haven't changed that[0] (course description in english at the bottom of the page).

[0] http://studia.elka.pw.edu.pl/pl/18L/s/eres/eres/wwersje$.sta...

I learned basic ABEL at Purdue in 2006 in the digital intro. course. "identify operators and keywords used to create ABEL programs" remains in the course objectives in 2018 (https://engineering.purdue.edu/ece270/Docs/learning_outs_and...)

I believe there are some Lattice ispPAC parts that still use ABEL, at least on the back end of their GUI.

Xilinx supported their flavor until ISE 10 which is still available to download. They also had a code converter to the HDLs so you could still theoretically target the latest FPGAs using ABEL with some scripting to orchestrate the mixed tooling.

Holy shit, around 2005/6 I took an EE class in programmable logic that used ABEL for the labs. I couldn't find any information on it anywhere and all we had to learn the language was an old single-page photocopy of an example that had been re-copied so many times it was barely readable. And the ends of the lines were cut off.

Needless to say, the ABEL projects were frustrating...indeed a shame that it's not open source.

I have an original manual around here somewhere, I wonder if anyone would shoot me if I scanned it and made it available :-/

Some more info (I'm surprised at the response here!):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Boolean_Expression_La...

"The ABEL concept and original compiler were created by Russell de Pina of Data I/O's Applied Research Group in 1981." This is false. I don't know what de Pina did, but ABEL was developed from scratch by the 7 member team listed in Wikipedia, and the grammar and semantics were designed by myself.

> I have an original manual around here somewhere, I wonder if anyone would shoot me if I scanned it and made it available :-/

Is there some "copyright" printed on it? Before 1989 it was apparently "required" and if not printed apparently it matters if "the author made diligent attempts to correct the situation":

https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/copyright-protect...

"you should assume that every work is protected by copyright unless you can establish that it is not. As mentioned above, you can’t rely on the presence or absence of a copyright notice (©) to make this determination, because a notice is not required for works published after March 1, 1989. And even for works published before 1989, the absence of a copyright notice may not affect the validity of the copyright — for example, if the author made diligent attempts to correct the situation.

The exception is for materials put to work under the “fair use rule.” This rule recognizes that society can often benefit from the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials when the purpose of the use serves the ends of scholarship, education or an informed public. For example, scholars must be free to quote from their research resources in order to comment on the material. To strike a balance between the needs of a public to be well-informed and the rights of copyright owners to profit from their creativity, Congress passed a law authorizing the use of copyrighted materials in certain circumstances deemed to be “fair” — even if the copyright owner doesn’t give permission."

It's not simple, but maybe an interesting starting point... Maybe, if there's if it is not a product actually being sold or even used as such anymore, there's reasonable chance that the copyright holder wouldn't be interested to enforce the protection of the "historical material"?

FWIW, this appears to be de Pina's contribution:

http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/PLD_History/ABEL_project/Russ_d...

Did you go to Caltech by any chance?

Yes:

http://walterbright.com/

But my degree is ME, not CS nor EE.

Verilog was heavily influenced by ABEL, and is now the predominant HDL in many places.

Have you looked at chisel?

I had a co-worker that still liked ABEL, I think. Was that the crazy HDL that assumed it could output anything it wanted in unconstrained cases?

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