Re: SML.NET

On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, dvanhorn wrote:

> Aaron S. Hawley wrote:
> >
> > [ML] cooler, than scheme?  i believe we all need a little infix.
>
> Quite possibly.  They both lend themselves to functional style programming, so
> once you get used to first class functions it's pretty easy to switch between
> the two.  And once you start thinking about types, your scheme tends to get
> cleaner.  And you start using pattern matching, which is a good thing.
>
> On the other hand, macros are sweet.  Quasiquote and unquote are sweet.  But
> you don't get that sort of thing in ML.  Call/cc is pretty sweet too but I
> believe only SML/NJ supports first class continuations.  And then of course,
> sometimes ML's type inference algorithm just doesn't cut it.
>
> -d

huh, i'm usually anti-macro (of course never having actually used macros
in a functional language).

in a related thread, found this quote:

"I feel quite certain that the reason Scheme feels different to me from ML
is not the parentheses, but rather the lack of static typing, algebraic
datatypes, and other semantic components. I feel certain about this,
because every time I start programming in Scheme now, the first thing I
want to program with the macro system is a static type checker, and not a
parser for an ML-like grammr.

 -- http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$2190?mode=day

I'd be willing to argue that ML (the theorom prover's language) is easier
to learn than scheme.  only because I still don't [really] know scheme.
/end edict

/a