I did my bachelor's project on translation between functional HDLs that were also reversible, i.e. only describing total, bijective functions. The idea of functional HDLs goes back to at least the 1970s, and the coolest language I found was 𝜇FP by Mary Sheeran. It was an algebraic VLSI design language where logical gates as combinators are the only language constructs.
I am hardware engineer in this industry. And I know Haskell and made my site with Haskell language. But I do not understand why Haskell is used to hardware design.<p>Designing hardware is much more important than describing hardware logic itself. IMO, VISIO and Excel are the tools to design hardware logic not Verilog nor like this CLaSH.<p>But, If this kind of HDL can be used along with Verilog, it might be helpful to build verification IPs.
There's already a commercial functional hardware description language called Bluespec.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluespec,_Inc" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluespec,_Inc</a>.
In a former life (a long time ago), I used ELLA for designing processors. It was a pretty decent functional language. Great at abstracting components or subsystems and infinitely better than modelling stuff with C.<p>IIRC European Silicon Structures used to offer it as a part of their toolset when VLSI design was young and hot.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELLA_%28programming_language%29" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELLA_%28programming_language%2...</a>
Is this meant for hardware people or software people? Because I'm a hardware guy and I don't know Haskell. None of my EE friends know Haskell either. I really don't see a serious hardware engineer using this over VHDL or Verilog, even if it is more beautiful or provably better or whatever.
without having looked at it in much detail, does anyone know how/whether this is related at all to bluespec (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluespec,_Inc." rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluespec,_Inc.</a>)?
I think we have a winner for the most poorly named programming language of the last decade. I thought that "Go" and "Hack" were bad, but at least I could type those on my keyboard.