🚀 go-pugleaf

   My primary interest in functional languages is not ease of programming
   from a human viewpoint (after all, adding imperative features to a
   pure FL will not make programming in it harder), but the ease of
   manipulating programs.

Too bad that languages like SML (and, moreso, Haskell) have adopted
such a comparatively complex syntax. Writing programs to manipulate
programs is much easier in Lisp, due to the obvious correspondence
between external and internal representation and a standard interface
to the compiler/type facilities (in the form of macros and type
predicates).

I think in order to fulfill their promise in this area, functional
programming languages should probably go back to Lisp notation.
Furthermore, some standardization work on interfaces still needs to be
done. Hopefully, the result would be cleaner than what Lisp has to
offer right now.

					Thomas.

PS: What statically typed functional languages with Lisp-like notation
are available? I believe MIT has something; can that be FTP'ed?