🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1991Mar20.154216.26337@cl.cam.ac.uk> nmm@cl.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) 
writes:
>Overall, it was the fact that people REGARDED it as unbelievably complex
>that killed it, because the few compilers that were produced were rarely
>brought up to production quality.  They could have been, and the world
>of programming languages would now be totally different ....

Totally? I'm surprised at people at Edinburgh & Cambridge being so, well, 
downbeat about this. My feeling is that ML is everything one could want in a 
child of Algol68 - the things that aren't there are the horrible stropping 
rules, the coercions, the i/o.. (Nick's list, I think).
I can add one more Algol68 misfeature that ML fixes, & that's the 
stack-implementation of closures. I once got a 5 cm hex dump from an ICL 2900 
for having the temerity to try out whatever the Algol68 is/was for

	    fun twice f = fn x=>f(f(x)); (twice sin 0.5)

I can't think of anything Algol68 has that I miss in ML. Oh, perhaps 
multi-dimensional arrays & slicing, if I still did that kind of programming.
--
Keith Clarke
QMW, University of London.