Vesa Karvonen is a student at the University of Helsinki. His interests lie in programming techniques that allow complex programs to be expressed clearly and concisely and the design and implementation of programming languages.

VesaKarvonen.attachments/vesa-in-mlton-t-shirt.jpg

Things he’d like to see for SML and hopes to be able to contribute towards:

  • A practical tool for documenting libraries. Preferably one that is based on extracting the documentation from source code comments.

  • A good IDE. Possibly an enhanced SML mode (esml-mode) for Emacs. Google for SLIME video to get an idea of what he’d like to see. Some specific notes:

    • show type at point

    • robust, consistent indentation

    • show documentation

    • jump to definition (see EmacsDefUseMode)

    EmacsBgBuildMode has also been written for working with MLton.

  • Documented and cataloged libraries. Perhaps something like Boost, but for SML libraries. Here is a partial list of libraries, tools, and frameworks Vesa is or has been working on:

    • Asynchronous Programming Library (README)

    • Extended Basis Library (README)

    • Generic Programming Library (README)

    • Pretty Printing Library (README)

    • Random Generator Library (README)

    • RPC (Remote Procedure Call) Library (README)

    • SDL Binding (README)

    • Unit Testing Library (README)

    • Use Library (README)

    • Windows Library (README)

Note that most of these libraries have been ported to several SML implementations.