[Sml-implementers] Re: [MLton] mutable fields [Re: [Smlnj-dev-list] Evolving SML]

[Henry C. <hen...@sb...>]

I always find it really inelegant that ML has both refs and arrays instead of
just making one use a vector of refs.  I am all in favor of having compilers
optimize away cases where the refs are not used in a first-class way, but it
seems to me like a real language wart.  Not only that, but it makes certain
things quite painful which are easy to do in C (like being able to take the
address of an array element and pass it around to procedures that are going
to mutate that slot).