[MLton-user] Thanks !

[Brian Donovan]

First of all, thank you to everyone (Matthew Fluet, Stephen Weeks, and
Wesley W. Terpstra) for your help.

Wes and Stephen: you were right about how I'd extracted the tgz. 
Without thinking, I'd used a  Windows-style archiving tool
(PowerArchiver in this case) to extract the contents of the archive
instead of using tar through bash.

After deleting all of the bits of MLton from my cygwin install, I
repeated the extraction process, following Matt's example and
everything worked - typing "mlton" at a bash prompt got me the info
line ("MLton 20051202 (built Fri Dec 02 […]").

The mlton bash script had been placed in C:\cygwin\bin\ and the value
for lib in that script is /usr/lib/mlton.

Incidentally, here's the output of mount for my setup:

bash-3.00$ mount
C:\cygwin\bin on /usr/bin type system (binmode)
C:\cygwin\lib on /usr/lib type system (binmode)
C:\cygwin on / type system (binmode)
c: on /cygdrive/c type system (binmode,noumount)
h: on /cygdrive/h type system (binmode,noumount)
bash-3.00$

As for running the compiled programs, I could have sworn that I tried
"./" before the name of the program from a bash prompt started within
the enclosing directory and had it not work, but that was quite late
last night and I must have been mistaken.  It certainly works now. :)

I can understand why my edit to the mlton.org wiki Installation page
was cleared away, but perhaps at least a small note reminding Windows
users to extract the tgz using tar from within bash (and not a
Windows-native archiving program) would be in order?  Although most
newbies are perhaps not as initially clueless as me, a few are bound
to slip through the cracks and I know that such a note would have
saved me a bit of thrashing about. :)

W/re to the MinGW port, I'm definitely interested (b/c it will produce
exe's), but I think I'll stick with the cygwin version for now - I've
looked over the MinGW download page
(<http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml>) and getting up and running
with cygwin and keeping it updated seems much more straightforward
thanks to the cygwin installer/updater.

You may not hear much from me for a while since I'm working my way
through Ullman's "Elements of ML Programming" (2nd ed.) and "The
Little MLer".  In fact, that's what got me started with MLton.

Thank you again for your help and your patience.

- Brian Donovan