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.

Well, what would you suggest?

"A Tour of Standard Meta-Language" is nonsense. If there's one really unfortunate thing about ML, it's that the expanded (original? source?) name of the language is so meaningless that nobody bothers to learn it. The name of the language really is ML, not something that ML happens to stand for. Though as others have said, the same is true of BASIC and COBOL.

"A Tour of SML" is still an abbreviation, is less clear for anyone who knows what Standard ML is, and is not the original title.

The first two hits that come up when I type ML into the algolia HN search (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) are

"ML From Scratch, Part 1: Linear Regression" (301 points), which is about machine learning

and

"ML for the Working Programmer, 2nd Edition" (266 points), which is about ML

Which is the more ambiguous? Noting that the second one is about a thing whose name is ML, while the first is about a thing that is sometimes casually abbreviated to ML.

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 "Standard" in the phrase "Standard ML" is all the context that someone with a reasonably broad knowledge of programming language history (as is common among the HN crowd) would normally need.

For everyone else, hey, click a link, learn a thing. Clicking links and learning about new things is theoretically a primary reason to come to HN in the first place.

ML as a language name has a historical etymology, but its not really now any more of an abbreviation than KFC is, its just a name.

> Abbreviations without context are not suitable for HN titles

Write [email protected] and get dang to make it a rule. Until he makes that rule, I call bullshit.

> use the original title, unless it is misleading

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is already part of the guidelines.

"misleading" and "potentially ambiguous" are not synonyms.

Standard ML is a well-known language. A title isn't misleading if it refers to that.

And nobody agrees with you.

> 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.