Customer Reviews

The Definition of Standard ML - Revised

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To explain it in the words of the authors: "The keystone of the method [used to define Standard ML in this book], then, is a certain kind of assertion that takes the form B |- P => M and may be pronounced: 'Against the background B, the phrase P evaluates to the meaning M.' The formal purpose of this Definition is no more, and no less, than to decree exactly which assertions of this form are true."

Standard ML is a very powerful language because of the abilities it grants and the restrictions it enforces. While reading this book will not teach you SML, it will help reinforce its subtle elegance. If you have developed an infatuation with this language, you will not be able to resist the only book that truly contains it.

While not necessary to enjoy this volume, a prerequisite to have any understanding of its contents is some sort of background in type theory and mathematical logic that a course like this one taught by Harper... can only begin to provide.

And remember, ML loves you!

This book is a lesson to programming languages everywhere. The language definition is succinct, accurate, and to the point. Anyone who has attempted to penetrate such documents as the ANSI C or C++ standard is met with hundreds of pages of ambiguous, confusing language, about which formal reasoning is next to impossible. By contrast, this book describes the language syntax and semantics in a precise, mathematical style, making actual implementation of the language straightforward, as well as providing a usable definition for reasoning about the correctness of implementations. This is an example of how language definitions should be done.

This book was apparently written by Math PHDs for use by Math PHDs. I found it to be pretty impenetrable. With this sort of language report, and the shortage of "how to" books for beginners, SML is probably doomed to obscurity, which is unfortunate.