1. General principles

1.1 Terminology

In the field of formal languages, thousands of hours have been wasted searching for the semantic content given by any new interlocutor to the most commonly used terms. Faced with this situation, several groups - within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American RASSP project (Rapid-prototyping of Application Specific Signal Processors) and now the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance - have sought to define a standard terminology that is precise, unambiguous and widely accepted. Such work is never finished, but having participated in it, we'll adopt its current state here. We give only a sample of the definitions, referring the interested reader to the reference document [1]...