In ML you can get a similar terseness to that of Haskell, but with support for imperative programming. If we allow the increment function to be predefined (as

In ML you can get a similar terseness to that of Haskell, but with support for imperative programming. If we allow the increment function to be predefined (as the Arc example does): let inc a b = a := !a +/ b; !a then foo becomes: let foo n = inc (ref n) or, with the help of the composition operator: let (<<) f g x = f (g x) let foo = inc << ref