How can you check invariants in VHDL? How can you write information to the console? That is what the VHDL assert statement and report statement are for!

The basic syntax of a report statements in VHDL is:

report <message_string> [severity <severity_level>];

The message string obviously has to be a string. The severity level has the datatype std.standard.severity_level. Possible values are: note, warning, error, failure

For example:

report "this is a message"; -- severity note
-- or:
report "this is a serious message" severity warning;

If the severity_level clause is omitted in a report statement it is implicitly assumed to be note. Report statements are sequential statements. This means they can only be in sequential regions, like inside the statements part of process or a procedure. They can not be by themselves in an architecture.

entity e0 is
end entity e0;
architecture demo of e0 is
begin
    process is
    begin
        report "message";
        wait;
    end process;

    report "message"; -- error
end architecture demo;

On the other hand, VHDL assertion statements can be either sequential or concurrent statements. You can write them in a process, or in an architecture.

architecture demo of e0 is
    signal condition : boolean;
begin
    process is
    begin
        assert condition;
        wait;
    end process;

    assert condition report "message" severity error;
end architecture demo;

These are several ways of writing a VHDL assert statement, where condition is of boolean type.

    assert <condition>;
    assert <condition> severity <severity_level>;
    assert <condition> report <message_string>;
    assert <condition> report <message_string> severity <severity_level>;

If no message_string specified then "Assertion violation." will be used by default. If the severity_level clause is omitted in an assert statement it is implicitly assumed to be error.

    assert 3 = 2 + 2;
    assert 3 = 2 + 2 report "Assertion violation.";
    assert 3 = 2 + 2 report "Assertion violation." severity error;

One last important thing is how to generate strings for the message. You may want to report the value of a signal (or variable) that is not a string. You need to know the datatype and use the image attribute.

assert i < 5 report "unexpected value. i = " & integer'image(i);