[MLton] Welcome to Vesa Karvonen

[Vesa Karvonen]

Quoting Matthew Fluet <fluet@cs.cornell.edu>:
> Welcome.  I would love to see some more work on useful libraries.

Thanks!

> I've played around a bit with John Reppy's ml-doc system, the system that
> produces the Standard ML Basis Library webpages, and have found it to be 
> convenient, if not perfect.  It does have the advantage of ultimately 
> giving a consistent look and feel to the Standard Basis Library and any 
> additional library documentation.

I have downloaded the ML-Doc system some time ago, but I was put off by
the lack of both documentation(!) and examples (or maybe I didn't look
hard enough). I would really appreciate it if someone would write (or
provide a link to) a short tutorial and a small example (tarball of
properly setup files) of the use of the ML-Doc system. I think that it
would save a lot of time for many people.

The HTML produced by ML-Doc seems pretty good, but I think that there is
still room for improvement. In particular, it is annoying that some
links are broken. For example, try clicking on the foldri-link on the
Array structure page interface summary:

  http://www.standardml.org/Basis/array.html#SIG:ARRAY.foldri:VAL

Also, while the interface summary produced by the tools is cute, I would
like to see a summary sentence next to each declaration. The same goes
for the index; I would also like to see an alphabetical index
where each name would be on a line with a summary sentence. Again, the
same goes for the "Manual pages" page.

Of course, since the sources are available, something can be probably
be done with reasonable effort.

> I would also like to encourage you to write up your little 'for-loop'
> combinator library from comp.lang.functional for the mlton.org Wiki,
> hanging it off of the "StandardML" page.

Done: http://mlton.org/ForLoops

Feel free to comment and edit. However, I must say that I don't have
experience using the library as I don't use a lot of for-loops in
my SML programming. The idea for the library occured to me while
writing a reply to a post on the comp.lang.functional discussion.

I would like to hear if anyone can think of a non-obvious drawback
with the (very simple) technique presented here:

  http://mlton.org/ProductType

The idea occured to me after I wrote the first version of the
for-loop combinator library and I don't recall having seen the
technique explicitly documented earlier. I have, of course,
encountered the problem much earlier while writing a simple
(non-monadic) parser combinator library and I wouldn't be
surprised if the technique has been explored earlier.

-Vesa Karvonen