Sending SKILL commands to a running instance of ICFB

Indeed, Lawrence is on the money. What you're seeing with the port:"/tmp/..." bit is merely the print representation of the object. There's no guarantee that the print representation of any object can be used as input syntax. Think of db objects, and so on. There are odd cases (for example, there's the funobj() function which can be used to retrieve a function object given its id, but even then these have to be used with caution because the id won't stay the same in different sessions.

That said, there's nothing to stop you writing a SKILL++ package using closures which could be used for opening and closing ports - and this could store internally (in private, non-global data) the mapping between file names and ports, so you could then have a function to retrieve the port given the filename. 

I just threw this together:

/* abPort.ils

Author     A.D.Beckett
Group      Custom IC (UK), Cadence Design Systems Ltd.
Language   SKILL
Date       Jul 16, 2009 
Modified   
By         

Package to manage ports...

***************************************************

SCCS Info: @(#) abPort.ils 07/16/09.18:53:08 1.1

*/

(importSkillVar abPort)
(setq abPort
(let ((portStorage (makeTable 'portStorage nil)))
  (defun infilePort (@rest args)
    (setarray portStorage (car args) (apply infile args))
    )
  (defun outfilePort (@rest args)
    (setarray portStorage (car args) (apply outfile args))
    )
  (defun closePort (port)
    (remove (get_filename port) portStorage)
    (close port)
    )
  (defun getPort (fileName)
    (arrayref portStorage fileName)
    )
  (list 
    nil 
    'infile infilePort 
    'outfile outfilePort
    'close closePort
    'get getPort
    )
  )
)

To use it, you'd do:

prt=abPort->outfile("/tmp/stuff")

If you've lost contact with your variable, you can then do:

abPort->get("/tmp/stuff")

and get the port back again for the given fileName.

Regards,

Andrew.

Indeed, Lawrence is on the money. What you're seeing with the port:"/tmp/..." bit is merely the print representation of the object. There's no guarantee that the print representation of any object can be used as input syntax. Think of db objects, and so on. There are odd cases (for example, there's the funobj() function which can be used to retrieve a function object given its id, but even then these have to be used with caution because the id won't stay the same in different sessions.

That said, there's nothing to stop you writing a SKILL++ package using closures which could be used for opening and closing ports - and this could store internally (in private, non-global data) the mapping between file names and ports, so you could then have a function to retrieve the port given the filename. 

I just threw this together:

/* abPort.ils

Author     A.D.Beckett
Group      Custom IC (UK), Cadence Design Systems Ltd.
Language   SKILL
Date       Jul 16, 2009 
Modified   
By         

Package to manage ports...

***************************************************

SCCS Info: @(#) abPort.ils 07/16/09.18:53:08 1.1

*/

(importSkillVar abPort)
(setq abPort
(let ((portStorage (makeTable 'portStorage nil)))
  (defun infilePort (@rest args)
    (setarray portStorage (car args) (apply infile args))
    )
  (defun outfilePort (@rest args)
    (setarray portStorage (car args) (apply outfile args))
    )
  (defun closePort (port)
    (remove (get_filename port) portStorage)
    (close port)
    )
  (defun getPort (fileName)
    (arrayref portStorage fileName)
    )
  (list 
    nil 
    'infile infilePort 
    'outfile outfilePort
    'close closePort
    'get getPort
    )
  )
)

To use it, you'd do:

prt=abPort->outfile("/tmp/stuff")

If you've lost contact with your variable, you can then do:

abPort->get("/tmp/stuff")

and get the port back again for the given fileName.

Regards,

Andrew.