Hello John If you are wanting variables, lambdas ... it sounds like you might be "off-shoring" - i.e. building a little language within Haskell that is executed on something else GPU (compiled to CUDA), compiled to C, compiled to VHDL, etc. Generally this is a "deep-embedding" as you need to produce output code for the target system. There are many papers on this - as for a survey of techniques there is one by Keon Claessen and Gordon Pace that gives an (albeit brief) comparison of shallow and deep embedding for Hardware EDSLs - "Embedded Hardware Description Languages: Exploring the Design Space". Also, the recent Kansas Lava combines a shallow embedding and a deep embedding so it can "run" in Haskell but compile to Verilog or VHDL(?). Andy Gill and colleagues have various papers describing its design. Robert Atkey and co-authors had a paper at the 2009 Haskell Symposium "Unembedding domain-specific languages". Conal Elliott's Pan was one of the first Haskell offshore DSLs (maybe the first?), there is a paper "Compiling Embedded Languages" written with Sigborn Finne and Oege de Moor. The authors acknowledge Samuel Kamin's previous work in ML. Later Conal Elliott had a paper describing Vertigo on GPUs. Quite a few papers have popped up recently about off-shoring "subsets" of Haskell to GPUs, see Joel Svensson's Obsidian and GPUgen by Manuel M. T. Chakravarty and colleagues. Oleg Kiselyov, Jacques Carette and Chung-chieh Shan have papers describing embedded DSLs in the "tagless" style. There are also papers by Jacques Carette and Oleg Kiselyov describing deep embedding in Ocaml - I think they coined the term "off-shoring", here's one: http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~carette/publications/scp_metamonads.pdf