SML/NJ HOME:

http://www.smlnj.org/index.html

FILES:

http://smlnj.cs.uchicago.edu/dist/working/110.79/

Summary:

This release is fairly substantial and incudes new Basis Library modules and the start of support for Successor ML, which is an evolution of the Standard ML language. It also has support for the latest version of Mac OS X (El Capitan) and Linux 4.x kernels, and many bug fixes.

Details:

Compiler:

The compiler is somewhat faster (about 7% when compiling itself).

Basis Library:

This version implements a number of proposed improvements to the Basis Library. Note that these improvements are proposals that have not yet been ratified and are subject to change! Specifically, the following proposals are supported by this version of SML/NJ:

[2015-001] Correction to ListPair

SML/NJ already implemented the semantics described in this proposal.

[2015-002] Addition of Either module

This change adds the Either structure to the Basis Library.

[2015-003] Additional operations on sequences

This change adds operations to the Array, List, ListPair, Option, and Vector structures, and to the MONO_ARRAY and MONO_VECTOR signatures.

[2015-005] Addition of Fn module

This change adds the Fn structure to the Basis Library.

[2015-007] Addition of Ref module

This change adds the Ref structure to the Basis Library.

[2015-009] Policy for exceptions and partial applications

This change standardizes the generation of exceptions when partially applying curried basis functions. The change fixed bug 136.

It is very unlikely that these changes will break existing code, but there are a couple of scenarios in which the code might break. The first is conflicts created by the use of open. For example, the implementation of ml-yacc had declarations of the form

open Array List

which created a type error because List.sub shadowed Array.sub.

The second class of problem is when a module implements one of the affected Basis signatures. For example, the MLRISC library had two modules that implemented extensions of the ARRAY signature and which required modification to compile.

In such cases, we recommend updating the source code, but it is also possible to compile against the old version of the Basis Library by changing the line

$/basis.cm

to

$/basis-2004.cm

in your CM files. Note that backward-compatible version of the Basis Library is only available if the old-basis target in config/targets was requested when SML/NJ was built (this target is requested by default).

We have also added implementations of the following optional Basis Library structures:

structure PackReal64Big : PACK_REAL structure PackReal64Little : PACK_REAL structure PackRealBig : PACK_REAL structure PackRealLittle : PACK_REAL

Successor ML:

Successor ML is collection of proposed enhancements to the Standard ML language. In collaboration with the MLton implementors, we are starting to add support for these features the SML/NJ. In this release, we has added support for the lexical extensions to the language:

• Allow underscore ("_") as a separator in numeric literals; e.g., 123_456, 0wxff_ff_ff_f3, 123_456.1, ...
• end-of-line comments, which are denoted using (*). End-of-line comments properly nest into conventional block comments. For example, the following block comment is well formed:
  (* fun f x = x (*) my identity function *) *)
• binary literals for both integers and words; e.g., 0b0101_1110, or 0wb1101.

These features can be enabled using the command-line option -Cparser.succ-ml=true or by using the assignment

Control.succML := true;

at the REPL. It is also possible to mark individual source files as being "Successor ML" sources in a CM file. There are several ways to do so; the easiest is to specify that they should be handled by the "succ-ml" tool:

foo.sml : succ-ml

Alternatively, one can give the "succ-ml" argument to the "sml" tool:

foo.sml : sml (succ-ml) foo.sml (succ-ml)

It is also possible to enable them by setting the control flag using the with keyword in a CM file as illustrated by the following equivalent forms:

foo.sml (with: parser.succ-ml) foo.sml (with: parser.succ-ml=true) foo.sml (with:(name:parser.succ-ml)) foo.sml (with:(name:parser.succ-ml value:true))

Bugs:

Here is a list of tracked bugs fixed (or closed) with this release, please see the bug tracker for more details.

Supported systems:

We have verified that the system builds and runs on the following systems.

Architecture	Operating System
PowerPC	Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
x86	Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
	Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)
	Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)
	Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks)
	Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite)
	Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan)
	Ubuntu 12.04.4 (GNU/Linux 3.2.0)
	Windows 7
	Cygwin (hosted on Windows 7)

We believe that it runs on any recent Linux distribution that has support for 32-bit executables, as well as on BSD variants, SPARC/Solaris, and PPC/AIX, but we have not tested these systems.