Hardware Description Languages(and macros).

[Matthew Estes <address@hidden>]

	I realize this may not be the best place to ask about this, but I thought 
people here might have an interesting perspective on this.
	After having a senior design course that involved VHDL, I decided that 
designing hardware with a programming language was cool, but there had to 
be something better than VHDL. So I started looking around, and maybe I 
don't know the right combination of words to search for in Google or 
citeseer, but about all I can find that's dramatically different than 
VHDL(and sounds a lot better) is Confluence. Everything else(Verilog, etc.) 
looks a lot like VHDL in terms of complexity.
	Is anyone researching hardware description languages besides VHDL? I found 
a lot of stuff about generating better FPGA layouts and ASIC's from VHDL, 
but no work into anything BETTER than VHDL.
	As a note, Confluence seems so much better than VHDL. The core of it is a 
functional programming language. I don't know if it does macros, but in my 
experiences with VHDL I found myself writing quite a lot of code generation 
tools for writing things like Finite State Machines, it definitely seems 
like a very good avenue to pursue, so I was wondering if anyone knew of any 
work, or was doing any work? VHDL seems so klunky compared to what a good 
solution would be.

						Matt Estes