Question

The following functions provide an actual address of the whole array or of its individual elements. These functions shall be used for accessing elements of arrays of types compatible with C. These functions are also useful for vendors, because they provide access to the actual representation for all types of arrays.

If the actual layout of the SystemVerilog array passed as an argument for an open unpacked array is different than the C layout, then it is not possible to access such an array as a whole; therefore, the address and size of such an array shall be undefined (zero (0), to be exact). Nonetheless, the addresses of individual elements of an array shall be always supported.

NOTE—No specific representation of an array is assumed here; hence, all functions use a generic pointer void *.

/* a pointer to the actual representation of the whole array of any type */
/* NULL if not in C layout */
void *svGetArrayPtr(const svOpenArrayHandle);
int svSizeOfArray(const svOpenArrayHandle); /* total size in bytes or 0 if not
in C layout */
/* Return a pointer to an element of the array
or NULL if index outside the range or null pointer */
void *svGetArrElemPtr(const svOpenArrayHandle, int indx1, ...);
/* specialized versions for 1-, 2- and 3-dimensional arrays: */
void *svGetArrElemPtr1(const svOpenArrayHandle, int indx1);
void *svGetArrElemPtr2(const svOpenArrayHandle, int indx1, int indx2);
void *svGetArrElemPtr3(const svOpenArrayHandle, int indx1, int indx2,
int indx3);

Access to an individual array element via pointer makes sense only if the representation of such an element is the same as it would be for an individual value of the same type. Representation of array elements of type scalar or packed value is implementation-dependent; the above functions shall return NULL if the representation of the array elements differs from the representation of individual values of the same type.