General Information on ML

Public domain compilers include Poly/ML, SML of New Jersey and Moscow ML. There is also MLton, which generates stand-alone executables.

The Standard ML Family page collects many links about Standard ML and related languages, implemnentations, papers, etc.

MLj is a compiler for Standard ML that produces Java bytecodes.

Consult the Basis Library definition, which provides numerous built-in functions for Standard ML.

Other applications of ML include the Fox Project, my very own Isabelle system and ALF.

Related functional languages include OCaml (which is broadly similar to Standard ML, though with some syntactic and semantic differences) and Haskell (which has lazy evaluation and a very powerful polymorphic type system).

Real World Applications of Functional Programming

I have written an ML Language Module for BBEdit and TextWrangler, two Macintosh text editors. It provides syntax colouring for keywords, strings and comments for filenames having the extension ML, sml or sig. To install for BBEdit, first quit the application. Then, copy the file StandardML.plist into the directory Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Language Modules/. The installation instructions for TextWrangler are analogous.


Lawrence C. Paulson

Back to ML for the Working Programmer, main page