[Oberon] Non Oberon code in Oberon

[skulski at pas.rochester.edu]

>Since the unit of memory is a byte, how would this help?

The objective is to move logic calculations to hardware, where the unit of
memory is a bit. This statement requires some elaboration. The "bit" can
be stored in block memory (which Oberon uses), in distributed memory
(which it could use) or in a flip-flop, which is outside the Oberon scope.
The latter is of interest for High Level Synthesis, because flip-flops can
become connected with gates, muxes, and wires, which collectively comprise
"logic fabric". A very fast logic function can be built with these
resources.

>How would you store a one-bit boolean?

In a flip-flop.

It is a vision that used to be a pipe dream, but now it is implemented as
High Level Synthesis by Xilinx and possibly others. I think that the NW
vision was merging Oberon and LOLA, but it was too hard at the time. Now
one could possibly map Oberon functions to the High Level Synthesis
technology bypassing LOLA. Such a topic is worth a thesis. I am not
advocating it here to the distributed Oberon crowd. But some academic
researchers may be in the listening mode, who knows.

Wojtek

________________________________________
From: Oberon [oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] on behalf of enso
[enso at apple2.x10.mx]
Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2016 7:15 PM
To: ETH Oberon and related systems
Subject: Re: [Oberon] Non Oberon code in Oberon

Since the unit of memory is a byte, how would this help? How would you
store a one-bit boolean?

On 01/19/2016 03:24 PM, skulski at pas.rochester.edu wrote:
>> BOOLEAN consumes one byte
> In the FPGA world you would want BOOL to be one bit. Furthermore, you
> would want logic expressions to get translated to hardware (that is VHDL
> or Verilog) and then be compiled to HW modules that would act as
> coprocessors. Such a translation would be optional of course.
>
> It is not a pipedream because Xilinx is doing just that with their High
> Level Synthesis.
>
> I am throwing this in for an eager grad student as a worthy project. I
> think that NW once had a dream of unifying Oberon with LOLA, but it was
> too far ahead of its time.
>
> Wojtek
> ________________________________________
> From: Oberon [oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] on behalf of Douglas G.
> Danforth [danforth at greenwoodfarm.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2016 5:48 PM
> To: ETH Oberon and related systems
> Subject: Re: [Oberon] Non Oberon code in Oberon
>
> On 1/19/2016 12:41 PM, Lars O wrote:
>>    Wait, there's BOOLEAN? hmm..
> Yes, but BOOLEAN consumes one byte.