The old CAST tools all started with a source processor called cflat which translated top-level instances into a text stream of the flattened representation to be fed into subsequent tools in the toolchain. In this section, we describe how to migrate away from some of the tools or use the HAC front-end as a backward-compatible replacement for cflat.
The replacement, hackt cflat or hflat, features options similar to those of the original cflat. Instead of running ‘cflat -<mode> <castfile>’ to produce flattened output, one now can now run ‘hflat <mode> <objfile>’, where objfile is a compiled HAC object file. For example, ‘cflat -prsim foo.cast’ would now be run as ‘hflat prsim foo.haco’.
Running hflat with no arguments will produce a list of the various present modes and format flags available as command-line options. All the formats used by the legacy tools come as named presets. Further fine-tuning of the output format can be controlled by individual -f <flag> command-line options.