Functional Programming and Specification: Harper's old "Introduction to Standard ML"

Functional Programming and Specification: Harper's old "Introduction to Standard ML"

This report is the the precursor to Harper's book. It is nice and short and so still worth reading as a summary of the main important ideas in ML.

Unfortunately, it covers a version of ML that is now obsolete. You need to be aware of the following differences while reading:

  1. Signature ascription is transparent, except that an "abstraction" corresponds to a structure with opaquely ascribed signature.
  2. He describes BasicIO for input/output. TextIO provides input/output primitives that are similar but more standard.
  3. Treat references to "the ML system" with a grain of salt: he is referring to the first implementation of SML, from Edinburgh. This implementation has been superceded by other implementations, including Moscow ML, that have the same basic behaviour but (for instance) produce different error messages.

Don Sannella. Please mail me if you have any comments on this page.
Last modified: Tue Jun 29 12:21:47 BST 2004