\chapter{Introduction}
This thesis describes the result and process of my work during my
Master's assignment. In these pages, I will try to introduce the world
of hardware descriptions, the world of functional languages and
compilers, and present the compiler that will connect these worlds and
sets a first step towards making hardware programming on the whole
easier, more maintainable and generally more pleasant.

In the first chapter, we will sketch the context for this research.
The current state and history of hardware description languages will be
briefly discussed, as well as the state and history of functional
programming. Since we're not the first to have merged these approaches,
a number of other functional hardware description languages are briefly
described.
