[MLton] MLton library project

[Stephen Weeks]

> I  think  that  one big decision to make is if the library depends heavily on
> itself.  I.e., in the mlton/basic stuff, although I really  MUCH  prefer  the
> style,  it all depends on other things in that style.  The result is that you
> have to carry a huge chunk of the library to use what may be logically a very
> small part.

True.  I wonder if the mlton/basic library, which predates MLB by many
years, would be better expressed as a large collection of small MLBs,
each explicitly expressing their dependencies on other MLBs, where
each MLB only exports a structure/signature or two.  Then one can
easily build subsets that will draw in exactly what's needed and will
only expose what one specifically imports.

> One  thing that I think would actually be a big help for small programs would
> be if the command line mlton would accept multiple .sml, .cm and This  way  I
> could just say something like
>     mlton my-library.mlb junk.sml
> to  compile  a  program  which  fits  in just one file, but needs my library.
> Without this, I have to create a .mlb or .cm file for every program I  write.

That is a very reasonable request.  I don't see any reason why we
can't take the meaning of a number of SML/MLB files on the command
line to simply be a single MLB listing all the files.