"Space is the place."

re the trailing backslash to indicate active-low signals: it's a remnant of my last job. While they were transisitioning to schematic entry, pretty much all of the design entry was done in a text "pin list" format, and the standard indicator for active-low signals was a trailing backslash. It's as valid as any other arbitrary text-based active-low denoter, and my fingers are programmed for it.

In case you're wondering -- the whole pinlist format was a company-proprietary scheme. We used emacs as the editor and there was a whole backend processing thing written in emacs-lisp that handled everything from adding new "symbols" to the design, to parsing the design looking for DRC errors, to spitting out a Tango netlist for layout (with design rules and everything) to spitting out a BOM. It was the work of a crazy mastermind genius who was also the president of the company. It was actually functional and once you understood the rules, it worked well. Being text based, it made for easy version control, and you never had to worry about your schematic tools vendor obsoleting the current product and all of your old designs. One problem was that the rules kept changing but nobody was ever told.

No, I don't want to go back to that.

Needless to say, when he and his partner sold the company to New Corporate Overlords, they each took their $25 million and that was that.

-a