Re: [Help-gnucap] Multiple instances having the same instance name

[al davis]

On Monday 15 June 2015, address@hidden wrote:
> That is the instance name XD is used twice for two different
> instances. The whole circuit works well despite what I think
> is an error.
> 
> Is this intended behaviour or should this fail to compile? 

Intended behaviour.

Just curious .. what do others do?

I am not sure from a user perspective which way is preferred.  
My gut feel is that it doesn't matter.

From a performance perspective, checking by any method is extra 
work which would make the total run time slower.

Old versions of gnucap had an option "dupcheck" to turn checking 
on and off, defaulting to off, but that got removed as being in-
the-way and incorrectly implemented in the conversion to 
plugins.

Technically, to do it efficiently involves using hash tables, 
which may happen eventually for other reasons.  Any  other 
method would be too slow for large circuits.  Using a linear 
search (O(n^2)) would be so slow that it would take more time to 
check for dups than the whole rest of the simulation combined.  
Even a binary search (O(n*log(n))) would have a significant 
impact on the batch runtime of a large circuit.