Re: [oc] Beyond Transmeta...

[Suboner@aol.com]

> The few systems I have heard of involve a host processor configuring an
> external FPGA. Leyland's idea suggests taking this a step further and
> building a "self-modifying" FPGA, which requires no external processor,
> as it IS the processor.  For all I know, this might have already been done.

I would not be so surprised, if it is an interesting idea, then someone is 
bound to have played with it already :)...

> I would not like to be the programmer porting the first compiler to the
> chip!  Then again, it would be a really interesting project.

I think so too... :)

I'm not sure if I should have mentioned this whole thing... I have a bug, 
when I started off programming in C, there was not much to think about, then 
I started transfering to C++ OOP, and things started to change in a direction 
of less control and rigid defintions. I basicly felt C++ was way to limited, 
I started thinking that definitions should be softer, or that a piece of data 
should be defined by how its used not how I define it in a language. At that 
point I think is when it started feeling like I had to make larger steps to 
achieve my goals... Like an image for example, it can be a bitmap, or it can 
be an spectrograph of audio, or it could be vectors, its not necesarily any 
one of those... Then there was objects, what functions go with what objects, 
should drawing functions be attached to the image to render to, or to the 
thing being rendered. If I do attach it to the image, then I have to deal 
with the many diffrent kinds of things to draw to a screen, if I attach it to 
the thing to be rendered then I have to have one for each type of image to 
render too. So I felt that I should not attach functions to either one, 
instead treat the function is a connection in a network. Then I came across 
the problem when does the function get called in this object network, that is 
when I felt it should be called when it needs to update. At this point I 
started wondering about lower forms of data like integers and floats, and 
started thinking that they to could be defined by how they are used/ their 
purpose, and by doing this you can directly control their bit depth, you can 
set it up so that if you change the width of an bitmap, that the network 
reactions by resizing the bitmap.

Leyland Needham