Hacker News Reader

Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Ocaml decided to be on the "large" while sml kept small it seems. I loved that trait (through Dan Grossman's MOOC). To the point that I found it even nicer to interact with than lisp.

View on HN

The smallness of SML is a big part of why this is 'A Tour of Standard ML' instead of 'A Tour of OCaml' or 'A Tour of Haskell'. It's small enough to learn in a couple days (in my mind!), but it has all of the niceties of statically typed, immutable functional languages, so it provides a good introduction to those ideas.

That said, I love how small it is, too. Every time I go back to SML, I find it refreshing how much power there is in a few simple ideas expressed well.

the benefits, how I see them, is that the language never impedes your mind.. there are like 5 ideas, and the rest is pure thinking.

but well I was acquainted to typed FP before, to some or the mere mortals (just kidding) it might look like a sad joke.

ML for the Working Programmer is also an excellent reference. It demonstrates the construction of a theorem prover. As a matter of fact, Isabelle was built with SML.

There's also a famously concise intro to SML (in 22 pages!) by Mads Tofte:

https://condor.depaul.edu/dmumaugh/readings/handouts/CSC447/...

do you know uses of ml modules for network protocols or rendering systems (gui or else) ?

Sadly I don't. I have only used SML for theorem proving and formal transformations from initial axioms to code.

yeah it would be cool to explore some different domains with ml, outside the usual logic/fp thing

You might want to check out "Unix system programming with Standard ML" by Shipman. The first half of the book covers the basics of SML and the Posix & C interfaces, and also discusses building a simple TCP client and server. The second half of the book is a larger project building a web server:

http://www.mlton.org/References.attachments/Shipman02.pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com