FYI, for anyone using Carsten Wulff's

cicsim

for characterization: Carsten has just added some syntax compatibility with CACE, so that schematics created for one system should be able to be used with the other. Long ago when I first wrote CACE for the Open Galaxy platform, I had noted that ngspice only evaluates mathematical expressions in parameters and some interactive commands, but not in other places like components. Whereas it is a common case to do something like set a voltage value at 1/2 Vdd or set a pulse width at 1/2 the period, where those values may be variables changing with the characterized corners. I had previously introduced a very awkward stack notation which was clever but not very readable. For the off-platform update, I introduced a new notation using brackets

[ ... ]

to encapsulate any arbitrary math. Then CACE would evaluate the expression to determine the value to substitute into the simulation netlist. So Carsten has added the same notation to

cicsim

. He also pointed out the danger of using python

eval()

on content which in the intended use of CACE is expected to come from any arbitrary 3rd-party source on the web. So I looked up how to do a non-exploitable evaluation in python, and it's safe now.