Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!ucbvax!ucsd!rutgers!deimos!ksuvax1!lbn
From: lbn@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu (Lars Bo Nielsen)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Major mode for editing and running (Standard) ML. (Code incl.)
Keywords: SML, sml-mode.el
Message-ID: <1357@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu>
Date: 16 Dec 88 17:06:35 GMT
References: <1355@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu> <33594@bbn.COM>
Reply-To: lbn@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu (Lars Bo Nielsen)
Organization: Kansas State University, Dept of Computing & Information Sciences
Lines: 35

In article <33594@bbn.COM> jr@bbn.com (John Robinson) writes:
>
>Could someone kindly explain what ML is?  Is it mock-lisp, or
>MAC-lisp, or muddle, or something un-lisp?

I better respond to this right away (to keep a minimum of similar
questions in this news-group, and not to have my mail-box filled).

Standard ML (Meta Language) is a strongly typed (including polymorphic
types), strict/eager functional language with abstract datatypes,
patterns, modules, exception handling etc. (a lazy version has been
developed in Sweden, LML). Its origion is Edinborough England where it
was first implemented as a tool for automatic proof generation, around
1980.  But the language proved to be strong enough to be used as a
programming language. The latest and far best implementation is quite
new, and was done by David MacQueen at AT&T.

Try it, you will like it :-)

If you have further questions, bug fixes, suggestions or idears,
please mail them to me.

>Also, a nit:
> .....
>I expect that many many terminals do NOT generate ^J when you hold
>Control and type Return.  This should also talk about typing either
>Control-J or "Linefeed" if that is present as a separate key.

Thanks, you are probably right, I will correct this in a possible
future release.

---
 Lars Bo Nielsen                    |@| Wise words in latin:
 Internet: lbn@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu  |@|  Vir prudens non contra ventum mingit
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