It looks like they've put a familiar, scriptish, face on an old gladiator. SML/NJ has more academic street cred than any other compiler that I know of. It did for the compiler research of FPLs what the Fortran H compiler did for procedural languages on pipelined architectures. It has been hacked on by the who's who of compiler research groups; Princeton, Stanford, UT Austin, etc. (thank god CMU had better things to do, staying a Lisp shop ;-)
P.S. Dr. Norman Ramsey, I know you read Reddit but I am not sure if you come here; old man, you turned me to FPLs in 1998 with your original "hacker challenge" :-) I stumbled upon your site looking for blackhat "hacking" materials and ended up writing a linker a month later because I stayed and read your papers.
http://mythryl.org/book130.html gives some differences from SML/NJ. It looks like it's slightly more than a new syntax skin (which is good, because otherwise the decision to fork was horrible; SML/NJ now has 64bit and the fork doesn't).
Mythryl handles (as part of language defn) printf format strings => type safe library call (I think Ocaml did this too).
The only thing I found that seemed substantial (more than syntax) was explicit support for an eval facility (also in SML/NJ, but not officially) -
http://mythryl.org/book153.html
And for the code examples:
http://mythryl.org/book117.html
It looks like they've put a familiar, scriptish, face on an old gladiator. SML/NJ has more academic street cred than any other compiler that I know of. It did for the compiler research of FPLs what the Fortran H compiler did for procedural languages on pipelined architectures. It has been hacked on by the who's who of compiler research groups; Princeton, Stanford, UT Austin, etc. (thank god CMU had better things to do, staying a Lisp shop ;-)
P.S. Dr. Norman Ramsey, I know you read Reddit but I am not sure if you come here; old man, you turned me to FPLs in 1998 with your original "hacker challenge" :-) I stumbled upon your site looking for blackhat "hacking" materials and ended up writing a linker a month later because I stayed and read your papers.