Eli Bendersky's website ... is really cool and makes life simpler !
So I have a block I have to verify. It sits on a bus with a processor and awaits input. I must verify that all its registers are correctly mapped to memory - write into a register, read from it and see it's the same data.
First, I code (VHDL) a simple model of the bus interface to feed transactions to the bus. It reads vectors from a file and initiates transactions. But going over all vectors and verifying that the registers returned correct data is boring !!
Perl to the rescue ! For each write transaction, expect a read and just test that the output file is correct (some cool pack() and unpack() hacking to decode the bits).
But hmm... why not generate the reads automatically from writes ? Easy, with Perl of course.
I really feel how my programming experience allows me to be a more efficient hardware engineer. You don't want to know about the horrors other engineers (no-no's in programming) do for "automatic" verification.
PS: I'm now hacking an automatic test-bench generation from a given module entity. This requires superficial parsing of a VHDL file. As any parsing, at first it seems simple, but pretty quickly you stumble into problems unsolvable without a full-blown parser...