palm?

[Pertti Kellomäki]

Bjorn Lisper wrote:
> 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.
[...]
 > Furthermore, the i/o model
> must be developed to accomodate the event-driven style typical for both
> embedded and interactive systems.

What would be extermely nice for embedded systems work is a functional
language with very lightweight threading (as in concurrency, not as in
threaded code) and easy inter-thread communication. One could then
assign e.g. a thread per an I/O pin in a microcontroller and write
programs in a style that matches the problem domain.

I have toyed around with a design for a sort of pico-Erlang to
accomplish this, but it is just vaporware at the moment. I have
looked at some work on embedded functional programming, but it
seems to be concentrated on resource constrained decices but still
rather high-end systems, rather than the extremely resource impoverished
8-bit controller world I am interested in.
-- 
pertti