Standard ML of New Jersey Interactive System

Type sml from the shell (command line). This puts you into the interactive system or “REPL”. The top level prompt is “-”, and the secondary prompt (printed after a newline when the input is incomplete) is “=”. If you get the secondary prompt when you don’t expect it, typing ; return will often complete your input, or typing the interrupt character (normally, control-C) will cancel your current input and return to the SML top level.

If the command sml doesn’t work, ask where sml has been installed on your machine and use the appropriate full path name or redefine your Unix PATH environment variable to include the directory containing the sml command.

Input to the top level interpreter (i.e., declarations and expressions) must be terminated by a semicolon followed by a carriage return before the system will evaluate it. The system then prints out a response indicating the effect of the evaluation. Expressions are treated as implicit declarations of a standard variable named it. For example,

This means that the value of the last top level expression evaluated can be referred to using the variable it. But remember that it will be redefined after evaluating the next top-level expression. Top-level declarations do not redefine it.

Typing the interrupt character (normally control-C) should interrupt the compiler and return you to top level. Sometimes you may have to type it twice.

Typing control-D (EOF) at top level will cause an exit to the shell (or to the parent process from which the sml command was run). One can also terminate the interactive session by calling OS.Process.exit(OS.Process.success).

The function

is defined at top-level (that is, in the top-level interactive environment) and, when called, interprets its argument as a file name relative to the sml process’s current directory and loads the text from that file as though it had been typed into the interactive system. This should normally be executed at top level, but the file being read can also contain calls of use to recursively load other files. It is a not indended that use be called within an expression or declaration, because the effects of such calls are not well-defined.

For loading serious multi-file programs, you should use the Compilation Manager.

The compiler attempts to recover from syntactic errors so that it can also produce semantic (type-checking) errors during the same compilation. Syntactic error recovery is more accurate for source files loaded by use or CM than it is from declarations typed directly into the interactive system — this is because lookahead is not possible when text is entered one line at a time.

When compiling files, the error messages include line numbers and character positions within the line. For example:

Here the location information std_in:7.6-7.11 indicates that the erroneous expression 5 true occupies characters 6 through 11 of the 7th line of input from std_in. For simple syntactic errors this position information is usually accurate or perhaps off by just one line. For some classes of errors the line numbers may not be very useful, because they delineate a potentially large declaration containing the error. If the error occurs in a file being loaded by <code>use</code>, the line numbers will refer to lines in the file being loaded.

There are a number of different forms of type error message, and it may require some practice before you become adept at interpreting them. The most common form indicates a mismatch between the type of a function (or operator) and its argument (or operand). A representation of the offending expression is usually included, but this is an image of the internal abstract syntax for the expression and may differ significantly from the original source code. For instance, an expression if e1 then e2 else e3 is represented internally as a case expression over a boolean value: case e1 of true ⇒ e2 | false ⇒ e3.

All the error messages produced by SML/NJ are documented in the SML/NJ Error and Warning Messages page.

Most users will interact with the compiler by loading code via the use command or under control of CM. However, some control of individual compiler phases is possible through the Compiler.Control structure.

The structure Compiler.Control.Print contains several useful flags and functions with which you can control or redirect compiler error, diagnostic, and result messages. Among other things, there is a variable printDepth that controls the cut-off depth of printing of large structured values.

The Standard ML Basis Library contains a number of structures, such as TextIO, BinIO, OS that provide support for such tasks as executing other programs from within sml and changing the current directory. These are documented in smlfamily.org/Basis:[The Standard ML Basis Library].