Documentation for Poly/ML

Poly/ML Basis
The Basis is the collection of all the pre-defined modules, values and types. It contains the Standard Basis that is common to all implementations of Standard ML together with extensions specific to Poly/ML. These include the thread library and the foreign function interface.

Poly/ML for Motif Quick Reference Manual
An introduction to the Motif interface for Poly/ML together with a simple example program.

Poly/ML for X Reference Manual (PDF)
A reference manual for Xlib in Poly/ML.

Windows Programming in Poly/ML
A short tutorial on programming Windows in Poly/ML.

Windows Interface Reference
The reference for the Windows interface.

Short Documents.

Source Level Debugging in Poly/ML
A source level debugger was added in version 4.1.  This document explains how to use it to debug an ML program.

Pretty Printing
The pretty printing mechanism changed in version 5.3. This document describes the new PolyML.addPrettyPrinter function and associated datatypes.

Overview of the Poly/ML Source Code
An introduction to the various files that make up the Poly/ML source code. The source code itself is fairly well commented but this provides an overview of where each file fits into the overall structure.

Other documentation.

IDE Communications Protocol
Details of the communications protocol used to communicate between ML and an IDE.

The Poly Language.

Poly/ML gets its name because the original implementation was written in a language called Poly. This was developed by David Matthews at Cambridge University as part of a PhD project. Most of the papers to do with Poly are now out of print so for those interested in Poly three papers are now available.

The earliest document is the Introduction to Poly written in 1982. This describes how to write simple programs in Poly.

The Overview of the Poly Programming Language was presented at the First Workshop on Persistent Objects, Appin, Scotland in August 1985.

The Poly Manual is probably the most complete and up to date description of the language. This has gone through a number of versions and was published in an early version in SIGPLAN Notices in September 1985.