test vectors generation in Perl

It always starts when you need to do something quickly... some boring, mechanical task, such as generating 256 similar lines with different fields, generated randomly, and some field increasing by 1 each time.

Most people in the hardware design world do this by hand, which is very sad... but we have Perl ! So yes, a Perl script is coded that does this, and it does it faster, AND can be later re-used. Great !

But then, you do want to reuse it. So, eh, the fields are different, the increments are different, 1/4th of the script must be changed. This is still far better than hand-hardwriting, especially for long sequences, but starts to get annoying.

Then you have a light bulb turn on in your head... How about writing a script which takes a template and uses it to generate vectors, controlling stuff with embedded variables ! Yippe hey, after a few hours of coding you have a 200 line script that can do everything you've wanted from it before, and many other things.

Then you start to wonder - people surely have done these things in Perl ! Test vectors generation, or in its more scientific name - ATPG (Automatic Test Pattern Generation) is a vast field in HW verification. But I'm not interested in the heavy tools sold by big companies for Ks of $s. I want some resources of self-cooked Perl scripts that do interesting stuff. To borrow ideas...