Caml & ML

Description: Caml is a functional programming language featuring strong typing, and is a member of the ML family of programming languages.
Caml offers garbage collection, both iteractive and compiling use, debugging, and polymorphism, to name just a few features.

In order to run some of the versions below on MS Windows, you need to install a Unix-like environment, such as Cygwin.
A native-to-windows version (of Moscow ML) is available here.

History: ML was developed by Robin Milner and others at Edinburgh University, in the 1970s.
Standard ML is a more recent offshoot, which has a formal specification. (The book, Definition of Standard ML, 2nd ed. is (c)1997).
Versions of Standard ML are Moscow ML, MLton, SML/NJ, and Poly/ML. There are no commercial versions, all the previous are open source and free.
Objective Caml was developed in 1996 at INRIA, a French national research institution.
Objective Caml's latest version is 3.07.

Applications: I am not sure what applications exist yet, but will investigate.
Caml Light is primarily for teaching and learning programming.
Here is a page for SDL/Standard ML bindings. SDL is a graphics and sound library.

Official Home Page: main Caml language Home Page

Newsgroup: comp.lang.ml , also see: comp.lang.functional

Newsletter/magazine: archive is * here *
or to subscribe, send an email to alan.schmitt@inria.fr .

Related links:
Intro to ML
some tutorials available here
Info on Standard ML
OCaml home page
Moscow ML home page
MLton home page - runs under Cygwin
the Wikipedia page for ML
the Wikipedia page for OCaml