im having this subject in my academic syllabus - VHDL. the teacher was teaching its programming syntax and he didnt know the difference between a hyphen( - ) and an underscore( _ )

Hmmm ok... Lol! But in fact VHDL is not a programming language but an electronic circuits description language...

So, your professor is not a programmer but an Electric Engineer trying to teach you a tool that will be useful for you to design and simulate circuits... Pay attention, I didn't and that was one less tool I had when I needed to validate my designs...

@mmcorreia yes you're right!!