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Defiantly worth studying SML imo. Pattern matching is a cool feature. Although it's not as comprehensive as most of the pattern matchers in Lisp. You can't match on bitfields, comparisons other than equality by value, etc.

Datatypes are just ok. Classes would be better. It's sort of strange to represent lists (and everything else) as enumerations. It's not really essential or fundamental but I guess that's what Lisp is for.

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I suppose by enumerations you mean sum types. I would argue that these are pretty fundamental? you have product types (structs/records/tuples) - a value is made up of x and y - and sum types - a value can be either X or Y. I think the combination of these is what you need to precisely express any concrete data type.

I did mean sum types, variants, etc. It's not really clear what I meant by representing the data but I'm referring to type inference. SML can't solve the problem, and Lisp doesn't have it.

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