Coding a translator between languages with high abstraction levels

Hi all,


I'm a computer science engineering student, writing his masters thesis
about a VHDL translator for ForSyDe
(http://www.imit.kth.se/info/FOFU/ForSyDe/ , a Hardware Description
Language embedded in Haskell, http://www.haskell.org/ ).


I don't have much experience in compiler design and development apart
from a toy Pascal compiler I had to code for an undergraduate compiler
course.


In order to get part of the work for free I decided to design the
translator as a Haskell compiler backend (ForSyDe is just Haskell
after all), which would allow me to start the translation at the
chosen compiler intermidate representation and only leaving
code-generation left.


I haven't gone through many compiler articles and books (mainly Aho's
book) but they are all cover compiling to low level, assembly or
machine languages. Contrary to what is covered in those
books/articles, I don't have to deal with low level problems
(e.g. register and stack variables allocation), the main problem for
me is dealing with the target language, due to the differences with
the original language.


Can anyone recommend any books/articles which cover translation
between high level languages? Pointing to an open source project with
similar characteristics would also be helpful.


Thanks in advance,


Alfonso Acosta
[In my experience, code generation for high level translators isn't
very different from generating assembler. Constructs that seem the
same always turn out to be just different enough that you have to do
grotty detailed stuff to get the semantics right. -John]

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