On 11/6/06, Neil Mitchell
Can you mention what you need type information for? If it is to detect higher order functions (as you have mentioned in IRC conversations with me) then in about a week I am going to announce a Yhc.Core first order transformation, which will remove that issue for you. In general the lack of types in Yhc.Core has not proved a major issue for anyone - if there is anyone who does absolutely require type information in their intermediate language and therefore cannot use Yhc.Core, I'd be very interested to hear from them.
As you said, detecting the use of high order is one of the reasons as it's not supported by VHDL. I haven't yet planned how to achieve the translation but VHDL, unlike Haskell, doesn't have type inference mechanisms. That means I need to declare the interface of whatever I will translate each Yhc.Core function to (i.e. VHDL Entities, Architectures, Functions ... )
I discarded GHC due to the current "bit-rotted" state of External Core
Igloo submitted a few patches in the last week to get GHC.Core working again. It doesn't have the same infrastructure support as Yhc.Core, but it does have the advantage of having the GHC team behind it.
Does that change involve ExternalCore as well? Either the way, those are great news. I'll have a look at it again.I don't know much about SystemFC itself but I'm familiar with SystemF and doesn't seem as friendly and easy to work with as Yhc.Core . I'll give it a try anyway. Thanks for the answer, Alfonso Acosta (fons)