Kind-of-off-Topic: Random thoughts on language design

Hi all, TGIF! And since it is friday, I started thinking on some alternatives to program PIC processors... I don't know how many of you are familiar with the PIC family of microcontrollers http://www.microchip.com/. They are RISC controllers with a wide range of complexity, starting on 8-bit and up to 32-bit, but the architecture is basically the same: - RISC - Register based (from 20-16k general purpose registers) - Limited hardware call stack. While studying Haskell, the functional bug bit me and I realized that this architecture is somewhat not well suited for traditional compilers. I suddenly started thinking on how one could implement some kind of declarative language that could easy the programming of those beasts. One of the approaches I thought was to use a block based programming (like Simulink), defining "atomic" operations that would be wired together. Do you think a compiler for this "block language" could this be implemented in Haskell? What about using the Arrow monads? Best Regards -- Rafael Gustavo da Cunha Pereira Pinto Electronic Engineer, MSc.

On Sep 26, 2008, at 12:30 , Rafael Gustavo da Cunha Pereira Pinto wrote:
While studying Haskell, the functional bug bit me and I realized that this architecture is somewhat not well suited for traditional compilers. I suddenly started thinking on how one could implement some kind of declarative language that could easy the programming of those beasts.
I'm under the impression that nhc98 has successfully been used on embedded controllers. yhc might also work nicely, with the appropriate core-to-CPU backend. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH
participants (2)
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Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH
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Rafael Gustavo da Cunha Pereira Pinto