obscure erlang-related publication

Ulf Wiger (AL/EAB) ulf.wiger@REDACTED
Tue Mar 28 00:56:01 CEST 2006


I came across this publication:

"A comparison of six languages for system level 
description of telecom applications"
Jantsch, Kumar, Sander et al.
http://www.imit.kth.se/~axel/papers/2000/comparison.pdf

I didn't see that under erlang.se/publications/

Was this paper known to others on this list?

"Abstract: Based on a systematic evaluation method with a large number
of criteria
we compare six languages with respect to the suitability as a system
specification and
description language for telecom applications. The languages under
evaluation are
VHDL, C++, SDL, Haskell, Erlang, and ProGram. The evaluation method
allows to
give specific emphasis on particular aspects in a controlled way, which
we use to
make separate comparisons for pure software systems, pure hardware
systems and
mixed HW/SW systems."

To cut to the chase, Erlang stands up well. C++ fares
"surprisingly" poorly as a specification language, and 
the whole thing is distilled into the following little
table:

Context               suitable languages
----------------      -------------------------
Control software      Erlang, VHDL, SDL
mixed HW/SW           Erlang, Haskell, VHDL, SDL
pure functional       C++, Haskell, VHDL
pure HW               Haskell, VHDL, SDL
simple HW             Erlang, VHDL

Unsurprisingly, Erlang gets poor marks on data 
modeling, typing, timing modeling and structural
details, but is deemed a good modeling language
esp. for complex control software.

BR,
Ulf W



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