Incomplete pin location assignments

Hi, thanks for the response. I did want to respond to a couple of things you said, mainly to clarify the discussion.

Certainly there must be pin assignments in order for the complete flow to run, to generate timing information, etc. In this case it does make sense that Quartus can assign floating pins. The Quartus assigned pins are guaranteed not to match any board, and generally one would not want to use the pinout for a hardware design, as it will be far from optimal.

So back to the point, the fitter can generate a random pin assignment to complete a flow, but the corresponding .sof file should not be generated, because it doesn't match any hardware, and should not ever be used.

Are we on the same page? All I am saying is that the assembler should not always be run by default, should not be run if the fitter has to assign pins. Seems like a minor point, but for students learning about digital logic, FPGAs, Quartus, etc., the point isn't so small.

Again, thanks for the feedback.

Cheers.