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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

The expansion of the acronym is more an etymology than the language's actual name. Calling it "Standard Meta-Language" would probably cause more confusion for most people. Similar to how nobody ever refers to Fortran as "Formula Translation", or APL as "A Programming Language", or COBOL as "Common Business-Oriented Language", or BASIC as "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Language^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCode".

(edit: basic, not basil)

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BASIC = Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (not Language).

Those abbreviations do not collide with a more common abbreviation in the same domain. Standard as a prefix in this title does not disambiguate its meaning. Anything to clarify it is a programming language would be nice.

If you're worried about the collision, I'd suggest petitioning the machine learning people to stop using the acronym. ML the programming language had been around for decades before it was common to use ML to mean "machine learning."

The name "Standard ML", with a capital S, is not ambiguous - it's (still, just about) unambiguously the name of a programming language.

You have to call the language something. For decades it was mostly just referred to as ML. In recent years people (including me) have started calling it Standard ML explicitly to avoid confusing people who now expect ML to mean machine learning. It doesn't always work, as we see.

Expanding to "meta-language" sadly is no good either, since nobody has ever called it that and most practitioners wouldn't even recognise it.

SML is a possibility that's used often enough, but there's a semantic difficulty there - the difficulty is that Standard ML is the standard version of a language called ML; it isn't quite a language called SML.

> You have to call the language something. For decades it was mostly just referred to as ML. In recent years people (including me) have started calling it Standard ML explicitly to avoid confusing people who now expect ML to mean machine learning.

IIRC, both SML and Standard ML were used to distinguish it within the ML family of languages before machine learning became popular.

> For decades it was mostly just referred to as ML. In recent years people (including me) have started calling it Standard ML explicitly to avoid confusing people who now expect ML to mean machine learning.

Aren't they 2 separate languages? They have 2 separate Wiki articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)

Or maybe the difference is more like Lisp vs Common Lisp.

> a more common abbreviation

Google "standard ml" returns 1,090,000,000 results. At least the first page refers only to the language.

Google "ml machine learning" returns 183,000,000 results.

Google "ml programming" returns a page with some links referring to the language Standard ML and others to the language ML, none to machine learning.

I didn't even know there were people referring to machine learning as ML.

Standard ML outdates the common usage of ML as "Machine Learning" by a few decades though.

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