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ML Types Explained

From a link on the mailing list edition of comp.lang.python, this talk on strong typing (in the form of heavily annotated slides) is an explanation of the ML type system and why it really doesn’t suck. From the same thread, Felix is a new high level C++ style language with an ML style type system which looks like it could be worth experimenting with.

Posted 27th August 2003 at 7:16 am

This is ML Types Explained by Simon Willison, posted on 27th August 2003.

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2 comments

I love functional languages - ML was the first language I studied at uni (although Haskel is much better - its lazy instantiation means you can generate and manipulate infinite lists!). Whilst some features of them have been absorbed into other languages its a shame none of the languages as a whole have made it into the mainstream (although Lisp can be considered a functional language). As a nerdy side note, programs written in Haskell can be mathematically proven to work, as all Haskell programs break down to lambda calculus, as such Haskell has seen some limited use in mission-critical applications.
Sam Newman - 27th August 2003 12:29 - #
ML's typing system is awesome. It's nice to be able to just code and not worry about what type you need to declare a variable as. And the fact that it does auto-templating for you is nice. It's such a pain in C++ to have to write function<type> when you want to use a function for many types... anyhow, ML is sweet.

Andy - 27th August 2003 21:07 - #

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