Description
We currently have two ops that behave differently (and are interpreted/handled differently), sv.reg and sv.logic.
Both claim to "Declare a SystemVerilog Variable Declaration of 'reg' type." (or "logic"), but these are explicitly the same thing:
From 6.11 of 1800-2012 (p68):
The keyword reg does not always accurately describe user intent, as it could be perceived to imply a
hardware register. The keyword logic is a more descriptive term. logic and reg denote the same type.
Presently looks like our logic is kinda treated like a wire (see #6317), and is not handled as RegOp everywhere.
There's a concrete reason we added this, so let's make sure those needs are still met (something about automatic logic I believe). Hopefully we can just collapse the two 🤞 .
Proposal (h/t to @fabianschuiki for good parts of this 😉 ):
sv.var -- single op for variables.
Both this and sv.wire would optionally take RHS operand for declaration-time initialization -- for wires this is continuous and for variables this is one-time. For net-type declarations (sv.wire) we can optimize continuous assignments into the sv.wire by adding the assignment RHS as an operand to accomplish what's done during emission presently.
I'd suggest we emit sv.var as logic instead of reg for basic four-state integer values, and continue with T x for other types (vector/struct), although we could include the var keyword to be explicit.
This would lose the ability to produce reg, but this could be an emission option if becomes an issue. LMK if you have any insights or concerns about tools or compatibility by this sort of change.