There is an interesting research question in here: how to design "lean" implementations of lazy functional languages so they can run on small handheld and embedded systems with restricted resources. In particular the restricted memory available poses an interesting challenge. What I would like to see is an implementation that is designed to be easy to port among different handheld/embedded systems, since there are quite a few of them (in particular there are many embedded processors). Probably a bytecode implementation is good since byte code is compact. Nhc might provide a good starting point since it uses bytecode and was designed to be resource lean in the first place. I think the people at York even did some experiments putting it on some embedded system some years ago.
Just a side remark. I wonder whether the byte-code approach is the best possible solution taking into account the overload of the decoder. Why not threaded code? The FORTH (and similar) experience, PostScript implementations, etc. show that this paradigm may be more interesting. Anyway, when you read for the first time the Talmud, ehmmm....., I mean the description of the STG machine by Simon PJ and others, you see that some of their ideas are not very far from code threading.
The classical FORTH style, with the separation between tha data and return stacks seems quite appropriate for easy implementations of higher-order control structures. If you saw the bells and whistles inside a FORTH processor implemented on 8bit machines, you would agree with me.
But I do not exclude the possibility that all this has been already discussed and rejected for some serious reasons...
Jerzy Karczmarczuk
_______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
