20000712 bug report

[Henry Cejtin]

MLton  currentl,  sadly,  has no support for checking for syntax/type errors.
As mentioned in the documentation, given a program which doesn't type  check,
it is even possible for the compiler to fail to terminate.  At the moment, we
use another ML compiler to do that checking.  We've been discussing coming up
with  our  own  pass  which  would  do  this, but, as you point out, it isn't
trivial because of the need for things like good error messages.

I don't know if it was obvious to you, but the error in the second program is
that the associativity of function application is left-to-right, so the line
    fun main () = args CommandLine.arguments ()
tries   to   apply  args  (a  function  of  type  string  list  ->  unit)  to
CommandLine.arguments, and to apply the result of that to ().