[MLton] the next public release

[Daniel C. Wang]

Matthew Fluet wrote:
{stuff deleted}
> There is also the GPL/open-source philosophy.  For example, I figure it
> wouldn't take too much effort to support a few of the "syntactic"
> extensions of SML/NJ: functor/signature within local, or-patterns, etc.
> And, to be honest, I think it would be a great incentive for someone
> wanting to port a bunch of SML/NJ code (especially any code already living
> in SML/NJ).  But, it's also fairly clear that such a patch would be
> rejected.  Now, nothing prevents anyone from writing such a patch, and
> making it available through other means, but the "nice" thing to do would
> be to warn them off up-front.

Would it be consistent with the MLton philosophy to have a flag that allowed 
MLton to accept SML/NJ and other language extensions for compatibility 
purposes? The flag could have three values "warn", "pure", and "quiet".

Warn would accept extensions to the pure standard but issue warnings when 
they are used. Pure would simply reject any use of extensions, and quiet 
whould just accept the extensions without complaning. Perhaps this last 
option is inconsistent with the spirt of MLton.

Just a thought, I think there is some tension between strict ad-herence to 
the standard and maximum utility of MLton... it be nice if this were under 
user control and not a design decsion that is unchangeable.