for hardware descriptions. Function applications provide elegant notation for
component instantiation and the various choice mechanisms (pattern matching,
case expressions, if expressions) are well suited to describe conditional
-assigment in the hardware.
+assignment in the hardware.
Useful features from the functional perspective, like polymorphism and
higher-order functions and expressions also prove suitable to describe
a fundamental part of the language. The need for dependent typing is
particularly present in Cλash to be able to fix some properties (list length,
recursion depth, etc.) at compile time. Having better support for dependent
-typing might allow the use of typesafe recursion in Cλash, though this is
+typing might allow the use of type-safe recursion in Cλash, though this is
fundamentally still a hard problem.
The choice of describing state very explicitly as extra arguments and
On the other hand, the explicitness of the states and in particular
substates, mean that more complex descriptions can become cumbersome
very quickly. One finds that dealing with unpacking, passing, receiving
-and repacking becomes tedious and even errorprone. Removing some of this
+and repacking becomes tedious and even error-prone. Removing some of this
boilerplate would make the language even easier to use.
On the whole, the usefulness of Cλash for describing hardware is not
University of Twente soon. Hopefully this will provide a better insight
in how the system performs.
-The prototype compiler has a clear design. Its frontend is taken from the \GHC\
+The prototype compiler has a clear design. Its front-end is taken from the \GHC\
compiler and desugars Haskell into a small, but functional and typed
language, called \emph{Core}. Cλash adds a transformation system that reduces
-this small language to a normal form and a simple backend that performs a
+this small language to a normal form and a simple back-end that performs a
direct translation to \VHDL. This approach has worked well and should probably
be preserved. Especially the transformation based normalization system is
suitable. It is easy to implement a transformation in the prototype, though it