[MLton] Main.main idiom

[Stephen Weeks]

> Well, we're always talking about making the barrier to entry low.

You know I'm always susceptible to that kind of argument.  :-)

> You are right that part of the issue is coming from SMLofNJ.  If we
> took his original source file:
...
> then it would have worked just fine in MLton without any additional
> work. 

Right.  This is annoying.

> I personally encounter it not only in the mlton sources, but in building
> the ml-doc tools under MLton.  It ends up being a two-stage process --
> using cm2mlb to produce a sources.mlb and then tacking on a call-main.sml
> to the end.  I've pushed all this work into the Makefile, but it is still
> a side step.

There is other useful general knowledge embedded in our Makefiles that
makes (new) developers' lives easier.  Maybe better than a new option
would be a standard Makefile template and an explanation of how it is
used to develop with both MLton and SML/NJ?


To be clear, I have no objection to adding the new option if you think
it's the way to go.  I'm just looking for a way to get more benefit
and more simplicity.