Not a huge fan of ML for the Working Programmer, personally. I'd love to see (or one day write) the equivalent of Practical Common Lisp (which itself needs an update at this point) because MftWP is sooo dated. But I can see how it's a decent enough intro.
Regarding your points:
1. Yeah editor support sucks. I normally edit in text mode with my own minimal keyword highlighting or ocaml-mode.
2. Poly/ML can definitely generate binaries! Most distros ship with `polyc` that will build the binary for you. But this is just a shell script around opening the REPL and calling some dump image function (like how you build a binary on SBCL). MLton and Poly/ML definitely allow you to build binaries. I don't know about SML/NJ.
3. For sure a pain. I use rlwrap [0] to work around this, which is ultimately simple enough!
4. Interesting! I personally find Haskell-style decorations so much more a pain since they're not inline. SML is very much like other major languages in the way it does inline types (TypeScript, Go, C#, etc.).
[0] https://github.com/hanslub42/rlwrap
Regarding your points:
1. Yeah editor support sucks. I normally edit in text mode with my own minimal keyword highlighting or ocaml-mode.
2. Poly/ML can definitely generate binaries! Most distros ship with `polyc` that will build the binary for you. But this is just a shell script around opening the REPL and calling some dump image function (like how you build a binary on SBCL). MLton and Poly/ML definitely allow you to build binaries. I don't know about SML/NJ.
3. For sure a pain. I use rlwrap [0] to work around this, which is ultimately simple enough!
4. Interesting! I personally find Haskell-style decorations so much more a pain since they're not inline. SML is very much like other major languages in the way it does inline types (TypeScript, Go, C#, etc.).
[0] https://github.com/hanslub42/rlwrap