CLA is intended as a tool to enable fast prototyping of digital circuits. The inspiration as to it's approach to this is rooted firmly in the UN*X world, where several high end packages costing several thousand pounds offer similar features (although much wider in scope of course, with a price tag of several thousand pounds, we could do this as well, but then we couldn't release as shareware).
The design part of the package supports the standard set of logic gates (ANSI style representations only for now I'm afraid - perhaps a set of IEEE symbols will be made available at a later date, or you could draw up your own with VECED2), and also a few librarys of standard components (eg, flip-flops, adders, etc) and IC's (the 74xx TTL series).
v1 & v2 had an integrated simulator, and v3 continutes this tradition by integrating a fast simulator. The simulation section of the system can be accessed at any time and provides interactive use of the circuit, with Logic scope analysis, 'live' indicator bulbs, active logic probes, etc, or more formal testing from an integrated Word Generator.
The whole enviroment is graphical, using icons, windows, 'flying' dialogs and the mouse to produce & simulate the design.
Not wanting to labour a point, but CLA is SHAREWARE. If you find it at all helpfull then REGISTER - you can then make sugestions for extra features you need.....if you don't register then you get no support from the authors at all.
It should be noted that CLA v3 is a ground-up rewrite of CLA, unlike v2 which still shared some common code with v1.
Data Uncertain has been developing CLA for about 5 years now, and will continue to do so for the forsee-able future.
I started CLAv1 after seeing ACE+ by Intergraph on a Sun386i when I started work at BAe Space Systems. v1 was released two years later whilst I was studying at Newcastle University (MEng Microelectronics).
A year later v2 was released with a new GEM interface, but the same underlying code.
Over the following monthes, several extra tools were added to the system (the Finite State Machine designer, VHDL compiler & Librarian). These were all developed to complement work I was doing at college at the time.
A year ago, I decided that the code had reached a dead end. I'd used HiSoft Basic to develop up to that point...but the time had come to get serious. CLAv3 was born, written using Lattice C, and developed from a clean slate. It took a year to put it together, but the results are good. With the experience gained writing v1 & v2, the new version provides much more editting functionality, uses less memory, and is more stable.
Whilst working on v3, I also needed to do some PAL design for my final Thesis, so I wrote the FSMsynth synthesis tool to tie up with CLA's FSM designer. It's only a command line program - but it does some awsome things that no other system for the atari is capable of.
Well, actually it is named after the girl I was going out with when I started writing it...
'Craig Loves Andrea'.
We never fell out, so the name stayed...and after 5 years, it's to late to change it anyway.
