SKILL is a

Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lispi ...

dialect used as a

scripting language A scripting language or script language is a programming language that is used to manipulate, customize, and automate the facilities of an existing system. Scripting languages are usually interpreted at runtime rather than compiled. A scripti ...

and PCell (parameterized cells) description language used in many EDA software suites by

Cadence Design Systems Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (stylized as cādence), headquartered in San Jose, California, is an American multinational computational software company, founded in 1988 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc. The company produces software, ...

. It was originally put forth in an

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operati ...

paper in 1990.

History

SKILL was originally based on a flavor of Lisp called

Franz Lisp In computer programming, Franz Lisp is a discontinued Lisp programming language system written at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, UCB) by Professor Richard Fateman and several students, based largely on Maclisp and distribu ...

created at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

by the students of Professor Richard J. Fateman. SKILL is not an acronym; it is a name. For trademark reasons Cadence prefers it be capitalized.

and all other flavors of

LISP A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lispi ...

were eventually superseded by an

ANSI The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organ ...

standard for

Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S20018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived fr ...

. Historically, SKILL was known as IL. SKILL was a library of IL functions. The name was originally an initialism for Silicon Compiler Interface Language (SCIL), pronounced "SKIL", which then morphed into "SKILL", a plain English word that was easier for everyone to remember. "IL" was just Interface Language. Although SKILL was used initially to describe the API rather than the language, the snappier name stuck. The name "IL" remains a common file extension used for

SKILL A skill is the learned ability to act with determined results with good execution often within a given amount of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. For example, in the domain of w ...

code designating that the code contained in the file has lisp-2 semantics. Another possible file extension is , designating that the content has lisp-1 semantics.

References

Academic: * G. Wood and H-F S. Law, "SKILL - An Interactive Procedural Design Environment," Proceedings of Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, 1986, pp. 544–547 * Quan Nguyen, "CAD Scripting Languages", "A collection of Perl, Ruby, Python, Tcl and SKILL Scripts". Published by RAMACAD INC. ,
A Sample from Google Books
* A Quick Tour of SKILL Programming with command-line examples of SKILL codes versus Perl, Ruby, Python & TCL (go to the end of the blog)

External links

Cadence Design Systems

Pill - Open-source implementation
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cadence Skill Scripting languages Lisp programming language family