M.: Feldspar: Application and implementation

Abstract. The Feldspar project aims to develop a domain specific lan-guage for Digital Signal Processing algorithm design. From functional descriptions, imperative code (currently C) is generated. The project partners are Ericsson, Chalmers and ELTE, Budapest. The background and motivation for the project have been documented elsewhere [3]. We aim to raise the level of abstraction at which algorithm developers and implementors work, and to generate, from Feldspar descriptions, the kind of code that is currently written by hand. These lecture notes first give a brief introduction to Feldspar and the style of programming that it encourages. Next, we document the imple-mentation of Feldspar as a domain specific language (DSL), embedded in Haskell. The implementation is built using a library called Syntac-tic that was built for this purpose, but also designed to be of use to other implementors of embedded domain specific languages. We show the implementation of Feldspar in sufficient detail to give the reader an understanding of how the use of the Syntactic library enables the modu-lar construction of an embedded DSL. For those readers who would like to apply these techniques to their own DSL embedded in Haskell, further instructions are given in section 5. The programming examples are available in the CEFP directory of the Feldspar package, version 0.5.0.1