Introducing AHPL

AHPL (A Hardware-Programming language) is a hardware description language based on the notational conventions of APL. AHPL makes use of only those APL operations which can be readily interpreted as hardware primitives. A few special conventions have been added to AHPL to represent unique hardware capabilities such as parallel control sequences and asynchronous and conditional transfers. No attempt will be made in this short article to list every feature of AHPL. A complete description of the language may be found in Reference 1. Our purpose here will be to present the underlying philosophy of AHPL and to illustrate its usefulness as a design tool.