-Hardware description languages has allowed the productivity of hardware engineers to keep pace with the development of chip technology. Standard Hardware description languages, like VHDL and Verilog, allowed an engineer to describe circuits using a programming language. These standard languages are very good at describing detailed hardware properties such as timing behavior, but are generally cumbersome in expressing higher-level abstractions. These languages also tend to have a complex syntax and a lack of formal semantics. To overcome these complexities, and raise the abstraction level, a great number of approaches based on functional languages has been proposed \cite{T-Ruby,Hydra,HML2,Hawk1,Lava,ForSyDe1,Wired,reFLect}. The idea of using functional languages started in the early 1980s \cite{Cardelli1981,muFP,DAISY,FHDL}, a time which also saw the birth of the currently popular hardware description languages such as VHDL.
+Hardware description languages has allowed the productivity of hardware engineers to keep pace with the development of chip technology. Standard Hardware description languages, like \VHDL\ and Verilog, allowed an engineer to describe circuits using a programming language. These standard languages are very good at describing detailed hardware properties such as timing behavior, but are generally cumbersome in expressing higher-level abstractions. These languages also tend to have a complex syntax and a lack of formal semantics. To overcome these complexities, and raise the abstraction level, a great number of approaches based on functional languages has been proposed \cite{T-Ruby,Hydra,HML2,Hawk1,Lava,ForSyDe1,Wired,reFLect}. The idea of using functional languages started in the early 1980s \cite{Cardelli1981,muFP,DAISY,FHDL}, a time which also saw the birth of the currently popular hardware description languages such as \VHDL.
+
+What gives functional languages as hardware description languages their merits is the fact that basic combinatorial circuits are equivalent to mathematical function, and that functional languages lend themselves very well to describe and compose these mathematical functions.