Comparison of Six Languages for System Level Descriptions of Telecom Systems

Language evaluation for various purposes is an often repeated exercise in industry and academia. Due to the large number of influencing factors the dependence of the result on implicit or explicit assumptions is not always apparent and clear. 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, which represent different paradigms. 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.