Programming Languages: Concepts and Implementation

B.2 Introduction

ML (historically, MetaLanguage) is, like Scheme, a language supporting primarily functional programming with some imperative features. It was developed by A. J. Robin Milner and others in the early 1970s at the University of Edinburgh. ML is a general-purpose programming language in that it incorporates functional features from Lisp, rule-based programming (i.e., pattern matching) from Prolog, and data abstraction from Smalltalk and C++. ML is an ideal vehicle through which to explore the language concepts of type safety, type inference, and currying. The objective here, however, is elementary programming in ML. ML also, like Scheme, is statically scoped. We leave the use of ML to explore these language concepts to the main ...