I really like the syntax of Standard ML. It's pretty much the essence of that kind of static functional language, without a bunch of experiments and cruft bolte

I really like the syntax of Standard ML. It's pretty much the essence of that kind of static functional language, without a bunch of experiments and cruft bolted on. Lack of cruft aside, even the basic syntactic choices are just plain better than OCaml, e.g. - Commas instead of semicolons as separators in lists/records. - Local declarations mirror top-level declarations. - Distinct keyword to create a new type vs a mere type alias. - ...