University of Malta. Faculty of Information and Communication Technology
Abstract
General purpose functional languages have been widely used as host languages for the embedding of domain specific languages, especially hardware description languages. The embedding approach provides various
abstraction techniques, enabling the description of generators for whole
families of circuits, in particular parameterised regular circuits. The two-stage language setting that is achieved by means of embedding, provides
a means to reason about the generated circuits as data objects within
the host language. Nonetheless, these circuit objects lack information
about their generators, or about the manner in which these where generated, which can be used for placement and analysis. In this paper, we
use reFLect as a functional language with reflection features, to enable us
not only to access the circuits, but also the circuit generators. Through
the use of code quotation and pattern matching, we propose a framework
through which we can access the structure of the circuit in terms of nested
blocks that map the generation flow that was followed by the generator.peer-reviewe
