[MLton] SML Reference

[Matthew Fluet]

> My SML hacking skills are severely limited.  My exposure is through
> "The Little MLer" from a few years ago, and some course notes I found
> on-line.
>
> Are there any well-liked references/books that cover the more recent
> aspects of SML?

The ultimate reference is of course _The Definition of Standard ML_, but
that doesn't really cover idiomatic uses of SML.  Hopefully by the end of
the month, _The Standard ML Basis Library_ will be published.  In addition
to the manual pages available on-line, the book version has 7 chapters on
using the Standard Library effectively.

I have both
 ML for the Working Programmer  by Lawrence C. Paulson
 Elements of ML Programming, ML97 Edition (2nd Edition)  by Jeffrey D. Ullman
although I aquired both sufficiently after learning SML that I've never
bothered reading them from cover to cover.

  Modern Compiler Implementation in ML  by Andrew W. Appel
isn't really a SML tutorial, but you'll see SML put to good use.

Likewise,
  Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki
shows how to put functional programming to good use.  Compare Okasaki's
red-black tree implementation to CLR's.