1 Using MLWorks interactively

1.5 More on interacting with MLWorks

To quote from the Definition of Standard ML (Milner, R.; Tofte, M.; and Harper, R.; 1990, The MIT Press); "the Definition" hereafter:

: ML is an interactive language, and a program consists of a sequence of top-level declarations; the execution of each declaration modifies the top-level environment, which we call a basis, and reports the modification to the user.

In MLWorks, we call this top-level environment a context rather than a "basis", to avoid confusion with the Standard ML Basis library. Additionally, we reserve the term environment to describe the MLWorks interactive system, as invoked with the mlworks script; we never use the term "environment" in the way the Definition uses it in the quotation above.

There are two kinds of contexts to distinguish between: the interactive context and the batch context. The interactive context is, essentially, what is available to you when you are running the MLWorks interactive environment, while the batch context is what is available to a program being compiled using the MLWorks batch compilation system, which allows you to compile ML code for execution outside the interactive environment -- and hence, outside the interactive context. There are important differences between the two contexts which we discuss in Chapter 2, "Building Applications", which describes the batch compilation system.

MLWorks User Guide (UNIX version 1.0) - 3 DEC 1996

Generated with Harlequin WebMaker