RE: potential technological idea

From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Sat Sep 10 2005 - 16:16:20 MDT


Hi David,

This is a hard project but not an infeasible one.

The approach I would take would be to try to make a nice FPGA implementation
of term graph rewriting, a key operation underlying functional languages
(e.g. efficient graph rewriting enables efficient functional program
optimization).

I don't know if anyone has tried this before but it seems a natural idea,
and I can't find anything on it via cursory Googling.

Some pointers to the graph rewriting literature are:

homepages.cwi.nl/~sccblom/publications/VU01-blom-phd.pdf
(which contains some material on functional programming as well)

www.cs.queensu.ca/home/blostein/LNCS1073.pdf

As well as Haskell, the language CLEAN is worth looking at in this context.

-- Ben

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-sl4@sl4.org [mailto:owner-sl4@sl4.org]On Behalf Of David
> Picon Alvarez
> Sent: Saturday, September 10, 2005 3:14 PM
> To: sl4@sl4.org
> Subject: potential technological idea
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I've got around a spare Xilinx Spartan3 FPGA, and on the light that some
> people on this list share with me, a respect and liking for interesting
> pure-functional programming paradigms, I was wondering if it
> would make any
> sense trying to write a Haskell-ish native processor on it. Hardware
> acceleration could take the problems of Haskell inefficient code
> a long way.
>
> I note though that I'm not any kind of hardware expert (I got
> that board in
> order to learn and play around) so I can't make any promises that it is a
> doable thing.
>
> --David.
>
>
>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:52 MDT