7 May
2020
7 May
'20
4:58 p.m.
Was sml/nj part of UNIX at some point? was it
considered as a language to
use
(proof tools may be)?
I was wondering if there is any history in common between the two. I've
been
unable to find anything :-?, please share your
stories! :-D
Is it true that the language was too slow to be generally useful? There
seems to
be
commentaries along these lines on the internet.
To my knowledge, sml/nj was never part of the Unix distribution, though it
was definitely available thereon (and also on SunOS). One of the main people
behind SML/NJ was Dave MacQueen, who was in the same general organization as
the Unix people.
As for sml/nj being too slow to be generally useful, Rob Pike (I think) once
wrote a desk-calculator program in C. I took that program and rewrote it in
sml/nj. Compared to the C version, it ran about twice as slowly and the
source code was about half the size. So no, I don't think sml/nj was slow.