Lambdas in the liftshaft---functional programming and an embedded architecture
Malcolm Wallace, Colin Runciman · 1995
Embedded computer systems seem to be the antithesis of functional language systems.Embedded systems are small, stand-alone, and are often forced to accept inelegant design compromises due to hardware cost.They run continuously and are reactive, that is, their primary goal is to monitor sensors and control effecters, using observed external events to trigger state-changing control actions.Yet this paper describes how functional abstraction can tame the inelegance of embedded systems.Architectural compromises can be made in device drivers, programmed within the functional language, but a function-level interface is presented to the application programmer.Examples are given from a liftshaft case study.