CHAPTER 11
LOGICAL VIEWS
11.1 LESSON FROM THE REAL WORLD: THE MANAGER’S PERSPECTIVE AND THE ENGINEER’S PERSPECTIVE
Years ago, I was working as a library engineer for a data-communications division of a large well-known microprocessor company. At the time, our division was using an internally developed wrapper around an industry standard logical language. This was common practice for the company at the time, either with internally developed tools themselves or internally developed wrappers around most external tools that the company used. For instance, for one slightly amusing aside, they were seriously concerned that their engineers would have difficulty adjusting from English to metric measure, so they converted all English measures to “nearly” metric by assuming just 25 “nearly metric” millimeter units to the inch, which led to the development of the mocron, which was slightly bigger than the micron.
At any rate, the computer-aided design (CAD) engineer who was in charge of developing and supporting the logical wrapper had just completed a postgraduate degree in finite mathematics and decided that it made eminent sense to use these finite mathematic techniques to build the wrapper. This would have been fine except for the construct that was employed for building clock cycles within the wrapper. The algorithm that he used applied the clock at X/Y of the way through the cycle, with X < Y, and then ran the remaining cycle assuming a length of time of 1 − (X/Y). This was all fine ...
