Applicative Languages and Digital Hardware Description
GR Hellestrand · Digital Systems Design · 1980
Applicative languages (Backus 1978) are pertinent in digital hardware description. The facility to describe abstract transformations or mappings and the consequent capability to denote functionals (formed from functions and functionals under composition, construction and selection) permits the description of hardware in a substantially data size independent manner. Functionals may be applied recursively. The hardware which may be generated from such a description is dependent only upon the basic functions defined. For example, if the fundamental mappings 'and' and 'not' are defined abstractly for the Boolean logic system, then any combinational circuit is describable naturally as an applicative function (providing of course the usual rules for function application are observed). An applicative system provides the basis for a current hardware description language MODAL (Hellestrand 1978, 1979). This paper will describe the applicative system appropriate for digital hardware description.