lilac / mi

An experimental language based on SML

Mi is an (experimental) modern practical functional programming language. It can be seem as a dialect of the Standard ML language, however is not intended to conform to the SML standard.

• The 'm' in the name can be interpreted as "meta" or "modern";
• and the 'i' means "intuitive" or "intelligent".

The motivations of this language are:

• Ecosystem > Standard

  The history of SML told us a non-restricted standard is worse than nothing. The incompatibility of different SML implementations makes the SML community fragmented, as you can hardly find or write a library that works on all SML implementations. Ocaml does not have a standard, but this does not prevent it owning a better ecosystem than SML.

  To have a good ecosystem, the language's toolchain should help documentation, testing, library distribution and etc. For instance, it is expected to have documentation generator, test framework and package manager built in.

• User experience > Efficiency

  In most circumstances, the adoption of a (new) language relies more on the user (developer) experience of the language than the performance of compilers or interpreters.

Why based on Standard ML?

• The standard ML language is well defined, and its syntax is more coherent and cleaner than that of Ocaml.
• As a strict language, Standard ML is more user friendly than Haskell, which is non-strict and pure.