Hi, Tobias Muehlberg and I have just given the aforementioned talk. The abstract is at the bottom of this email, and the slides are available at: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/plasma/talkrelated/318.pdf
I'm keen to get more details of this. Did it use Yhc? Where does Lava come in? (We were thinking of using some form of FRP, as in Frob or Yampa.) -- P
My approach was just to add a C backend to Lava, in which circuits get turned into C. Lava alone is not great for control systems, but Koen Claessen and Gordon Pace have defined an Esterel-like language (amongst other languages), called Flash, on top of Lava. Essentially, if you write an interepreter/semantics for your own custom language in Lava, then you get a compiler from that language to VHDL (and now C) for free. See Koen's thesis for more details: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~koen/pubs/phd01-thesis.ps (in particular chapter 6, and perhaps chapter 5) The seperation of Lava and languages like Flash reminds me of the pure/monadic divide when programming in Haskell, e.g. Lava (pure) functions can be called from Flash (impure) programs, and Flash programs can be turned into Lava functions by "running" them. The Lava homepage is: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~koen/Lava/ I can provide my C/MindStorms backend to anyone who wants it. But it is not the most efficient code! Perhaps this general approach is more attractive to hardware designers than software programmers, because Lava expands out most recursion at compile time (which is good for parallelism, but not for binary size). This isn't a problem when you have languages like Flash available, but you might then ask "is this really programming in Haskell"? So, read the slides and judge for yourself! Thanks everyone for your interest! Matt. Room : CS202J Date : 01 March 2007 Time : 12:15 -- 13:15 Speaker : Matthew Naylor, Jan Tobias Muehlberg Title : FUN with Lego Mindstorms Abstract: In this talk, we will present how Lego Mindstorms robots can serve as a delightful example for the development of safety-critical embeded software systems. We will give a brief overview of Esterel's SCADE suite and show how it can be used to design programs for Lego robots, to prove safety properties for these programs and to generate C source code that actually runs on the Mindstorms RCX. In addition to this, Matthew will explain how the whole stuff can be done using Haskell. The talk is based on our experience from the Reactive Systems Design module. ----- End forwarded message -----