separate compilation. The system gives meaning to individual program fragments, called units. Units may depend on one another in a way specified by the programmer. A dependency may be mediated by an interface (the type of a unit); if so, the units can be compiled separately. Otherwise, they must be compiled in sequence. We also propose a methodology for programming in SMLSC that reflects code development practice and avoids syntactic repetition of interfaces. The language is given a formal semantics, and we argue that this semantics is implementable in a variety of compilers.

This is a proposal for an extension to the Standard ML programming language to support separate compilation. The extension allows the programmer to write a program broken into multiple fragments in a way that would be compatible between different implementations. It also allows for the separate compilation of these fragments, for incremental recompilation strategies such as cut-off recompilation, and for a range of implementation strategies including whole-program compilation. The semantics of separate compilation is defined independent of the underlying semantic framework