What is The Difference Between ML And Smalltalk, Programming Languages

ML is an Interpreted Programming Language, while Smalltalk is a Compiled Programming Language

What are Interpreted Programming Languages

An interpreted language is a programming language for which most of its implementations execute instructions directly, without previously compiling a program into machine-language instructions. The interpreter executes the program directly, translating each statement into a sequence of one or more subroutines already compiled into machine code. (Wikipedia)

What are Compiled Programming Languages

A compiled language is a programming language whose implementations are typically compilers (translators that generate machine code from source code), and not interpreters (step-by-step executors of source code, where no pre-runtime translation takes place). (Wikipedia)

While ML is an Interpreted Programming Language, and Smalltalk is a Compiled Programming Language

Let us now look at the difference between the two:

What is ML Programming Language – A brief synopsis

Robin Milner and his associates at the University of Edinburgh came up with ML in the 1970s. It is an impure functional language as it supports imperative programming. Standard ML is popular among compiler writers and is a modular, functional programming language. Alice is a dialect of Standard ML, which supports distributed computing, multithreading and constraint programming. Caml is another dialect of ML and is a statically typed language that supports automatic memory management. Ocaml is the implementation of Caml that is developed as an open source project. JoCaml is a version of Ocaml based on join-calculus.

What is Smalltalk Programming Language – A brief synopsis

It is a reflective, object-oriented programming language that supports dynamic typing. Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, Dan Ingalls, Scott Wallace, Ted Kaehler and their associates at Xerox PARC developed Smalltalk. They designed it for educational use and it soon became popular. VisualWorks is a prominent implementation of Smalltalk. Squeak is a programming language that is in the form of an implementation of Smalltalk. Scratch is a visual programming language based on Squeak.