[aardvark179]

I thought this was going to be about the programming language, and I was wondering how they managed to implement it on a machine that small.

[foobarian]

That's funny, pretty sure we used Standard ML on the old oscilloscope Macs in undergrad. Not Apple 2 of course, but still already pretty dated even at that time (late 90s).

[noelwelsh]

That's also what I was thinking. ML predates the Apple II by 4 years, so I think there is definitely a chance of getting it running! If targetting the Apple IIGS I think it would be very achievable; you could fit megabytes of RAM in those.

[dekhn]

Likely any early implementation of ML would have been on a mainframe or minicomputer, not a 6502. A mainframe/minicomputer would have had oodles of storage (both durable and RAM), as well as a compiler for a high level language (which fits what I can see in https://smlfamily.github.io/history/ML2015-talk.pdf and other locations).

[Scramblejams]

Same. What flavor of ML would be the most appropriate for that challenge, do you think?

[taolson]

While not exactly ML, David Turner's Miranda system is pretty small, and might be feasible:

https://codeberg.org/DATurner/miranda