RE: Hardware Description Languages(and macros).

["Erik Meijer" <address@hidden>]

There are (at least) two really impressive hardware description
languages based on Haskell:

* http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~koen/Lava/
* http://www.bluespec.org/ 

Hope this helps,

Erik Meijer

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu [mailto:owner-ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu]
On Behalf Of Matthew Estes
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2003 11:13 AM
To: ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu
Subject: Hardware Description Languages(and macros).

	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