5 ms·

The name "Standard ML", with a capital S, is not ambiguous - it's (still, just about) unambiguously the name of a programming language. You have to call the la

by cannam 7y ago

The name "Standard ML", with a capital S, is not ambiguous - it's (still, just about) unambiguously the name of a programming language. You have to call the language something. For decades it was mostly just referred to as ML. In recent years people (including me) have started calling it Standard ML explicitly to avoid confusing people who now expect ML to mean machine learning. It doesn't always work, as we see. Expanding to "meta-language" sadly is no good either, since nobody has ever called it that and most practitioners wouldn't even recognise it. SML is a possibility that's used often enough, but there's a semantic difficulty there - the difficulty is that Standard ML is the standard version of a language called ML; it isn't quite a language called SML.

deckar01 7y ago
The title is title case. Standard would be capitalized regardless of the context.
- cannam 7y ago
  Well, what would you suggest? "A Tour of Standard Meta-Language" is nonsense. If there's one really unfortunate thing about ML, it's that the expanded (original? source?) name of the language is so meaningless that nobody bothers to learn it. The name of the language really is ML, not something that ML happens to stand for. Though as others have said, the same is true of BASIC and COBOL. "A Tour of SML" is still an abbreviation, is less clear for anyone who knows what Standard ML is, and is not the original title. The first two hits that come up when I type ML into the algolia HN search (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=ml&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) are "ML From Scratch, Part 1: Linear Regression" (301 points), which is about machine learning and "ML for the Working Programmer, 2nd Edition" (266 points), which is about ML Which is the more ambiguous? Noting that the second one is about a thing whose name is ML, while the first is about a thing that is sometimes casually abbreviated to ML.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> You have to call the language something. For decades it was mostly just referred to as ML. In recent years people (including me) have started calling it Standard ML explicitly to avoid confusing people who now expect ML to mean machine learning. IIRC, both SML and Standard ML were used to distinguish it within the ML family of languages before machine learning became popular.
jolmg 7y ago
> For decades it was mostly just referred to as ML. In recent years people (including me) have started calling it Standard ML explicitly to avoid confusing people who now expect ML to mean machine learning. Aren't they 2 separate languages? They have 2 separate Wiki articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language) Or maybe the difference is more like Lisp vs Common Lisp.

by cannam 7y ago

deckar01 7y ago

The title is title case. Standard would be capitalized regardless of the context.

cannam 7y ago
Well, what would you suggest? "A Tour of Standard Meta-Language" is nonsense. If there's one really unfortunate thing about ML, it's that the expanded (original? source?) name of the language is so meaningless that nobody bothers to learn it. The name of the language really is ML, not something that ML happens to stand for. Though as others have said, the same is true of BASIC and COBOL. "A Tour of SML" is still an abbreviation, is less clear for anyone who knows what Standard ML is, and is not the original title. The first two hits that come up when I type ML into the algolia HN search (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=ml&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) are "ML From Scratch, Part 1: Linear Regression" (301 points), which is about machine learning and "ML for the Working Programmer, 2nd Edition" (266 points), which is about ML Which is the more ambiguous? Noting that the second one is about a thing whose name is ML, while the first is about a thing that is sometimes casually abbreviated to ML.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> You have to call the language something. For decades it was mostly just referred to as ML. In recent years people (including me) have started calling it Standard ML explicitly to avoid confusing people who now expect ML to mean machine learning. IIRC, both SML and Standard ML were used to distinguish it within the ML family of languages before machine learning became popular.

jolmg 7y ago

> For decades it was mostly just referred to as ML. In recent years people (including me) have started calling it Standard ML explicitly to avoid confusing people who now expect ML to mean machine learning. Aren't they 2 separate languages? They have 2 separate Wiki articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language) Or maybe the difference is more like Lisp vs Common Lisp.