6 Excellent Free Books to Learn Standard ML

Last Updated on May 22, 2022

ML (“Meta Language”) is a general-purpose functional programming language. It has roots in Lisp, and has been characterized as “Lisp with types”. ML is a statically-scoped functional programming language like Scheme.

It is known for its use of the polymorphic Hindley–Milner type system, which automatically assigns the types of most expressions without requiring explicit type annotations, and ensures type safety – there is a formal proof that a well-typed ML program does not cause runtime type errors.

Standard ML is a functional programming language with a formal specification. It has static types to prevent a wide array of common errors, but also features powerful type inference, requiring few to no type declarations. It is easy to define new data types and structures, due to algebraic data types, and write well-abstracted, easy to reason about code due to its powerful module system and parametric polymorphism (generics).

There are several languages in the ML family; the three most prominent are Standard ML (SML), OCaml and F#. We have written separate articles recommending the best free OCaml books and free F# books.

1. ML for the Working Programmer, 2nd Edition by Larry C. Paulson

This book teaches the methods of functional programming – in particular, how to program in Standard ML. The author shows how to use such concepts as lists, trees, higher-order functions and infinite data structures and includes a chapter on formal reasoning about functional programming. This is meant to be a practical book.

These include fast sorting functions and efficient function implementations of arrays, queues, and priority queues. Examples also include a ^D*l-calculus reducer and theorem prover. Most features of ML (including modules and imperative programming) are covered in depth and the book can be used without an ML reference manual.

The main features of the new Basis Library for the revised version of ML are described, and many new examples are given, e.g. polynomial arithmetic and new ways of treating priority queues.

The reader is assumed to have some experience in programming in conventional languages such as C or Pascal. For such individuals, be they students, graduates or researchers, this will be a useful introduction to functional programming.

Read the book

2. A Tour of Standard ML by Alex Alegre

The tour consists of a set of chapters, each intended to showcase different features of Standard ML.

For each section, there’s a concise example illustrating the material.

A Tour of Standard ML is built using Hakyll, a Haskell library for generating static sites.

This tour is published under the MIT License.

Read the tour

3. The History of Standard ML by David MacQueen, Robert Harper, and John Reppy

This paper focuses on the history of Standard ML, which plays a central role in the ML family of strict functional languages, as it was the first to include the complete set of features that we now associate with the name “ML” (i.e., polymorphic type inference, datatypes with pattern matching, modules, exceptions,and mutable state).

The paper covers the early history of ML, the subsequent efforts to define a standard ML language, and the development of its major features and its formal definition.

The authors also review the impact that the language had on programming-language research.

Read the paper

Next page: Page 2 – The Standard ML Basis Library and more books

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