Programming In Standard Ml

Programming in Standard ML (W ORKING D RAFT OF M AY 17, 2005.) Robert Harper Carnegie Mellon University Spring Semester, 2005 c Copyright 2005. All Rights Reserved. Preface This book is an introduction to programming with the Standard ML programming language. It began life as a set of lecture notes for Computer Science 15–212: Principles of Programming, the second semester of the introductory sequence in the undergraduate computer science curriculum at Carnegie Mellon University. It has subsequently been used in many other courses at Carnegie Mellon, and at a number of universities around the world. It is intended to supersede my Introduction to Standard ML, which has been widely circulated over the last ten years. Standard ML is a formally defined programming language. The Definition of Standard ML (Revised) is the formal definition of the language. It is supplemented by the Standard ML Basis Library, which defines a common basis of types that are shared by all implementations of the language. Commentary on Standard ML discusses some of the decisions that went into the design of the first version of the language. There are several implementations of Standard ML available for a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. The best-known compilers are Standard ML of New Jersey, Moscow ML, MLKit, and PolyML. These are all freely available on the worldwide web. Please refer to The Standard ML Home Page for up-to-date information on Standard ML and its implementations. Numerous people have contributed directly and indirectly to this text. I am especially grateful to the following people for their helpful comments and suggestions: Marc Bezem, Terrence Brannon, Franck van Breugel, Karl Crary, Mike Erdmann, Matthias Felleisen, Andrei Formiga, Stephen Harris, Joel Jones, John Lafferty, Flavio Lerda, Adrian Moos, Bryce Nichols, Arthur J. O’Dwyer, Frank Pfenning, Chris Stone,