I used SML in my compiler course in college. Our professors loved SML and maintains a pretty popular compiler for it, so he was a wealth of knowledge and helped us along the way, which made it a much more approachable language than if I were to embark on learning it myself.<p>Really shows the power for statically typed functional languages, and especially the power of sum types. Representing trees with sum types is so extremely powerful and makes writing compiler oriented code feel very natural. I haven't used it since graduation, but if I had to write a compiler, I'd probably opt for an SML like language, like F#.
It would be great to see Julian Hyde's Morel [0, 1] on this list as well.<p>And also WebML [2], SOSML [3], Bright-ML [4] (had to refresh my memory from my 2020 post on the topic [5]).<p>[0] <a href="http://blog.hydromatic.net/2020/02/25/morel-a-functional-language-for-data.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.hydromatic.net/2020/02/25/morel-a-functional-lan...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/hydromatic/morel" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hydromatic/morel</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/KeenS/webml" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/KeenS/webml</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/SOSML/SOSML" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SOSML/SOSML</a><p>[4] <a href="https://github.com/elpinal/bright-ml" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/elpinal/bright-ml</a><p>[5] <a href="https://notes.eatonphil.com/standard-ml-in-2020.html" rel="nofollow">https://notes.eatonphil.com/standard-ml-in-2020.html</a>
Standard ML is incredibly usable but also very small (syntactically and semantically) especially compared with modern algol-family languages.<p>There are a couple of quality of life features missing (most notably is record update syntax), but I really enjoy that the core language has not changed in 25 years.
since i grew up with ocaml, i have found this page on its differences to sml rather informative:<p><a href="http://adam.chlipala.net/mlcomp/" rel="nofollow">http://adam.chlipala.net/mlcomp/</a>
Is there a history of the original ML dialect out there somewhere? It's surprisingly old, having first appeared in 1973 according to Wikipedia.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)</a>
As a fan of ML family languages I have a question for SML lovers. What do you typically build with SML?<p>For context, I’m web programmer and I’m also learning game dev, can I use SML productively?<p>Or are there other tasks that I could use SML for?