Sidebar: The Nonmarkup MLs

Computerworld - Not every language or acronym ending in "ML" represents a markup language. Here are the best-known exceptions.
ML: "ML" originally stood for "metalanguage," but it's a general-purpose programming language designed for large projects. There are two main dialects in use today: Standard ML (SML; see www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/stg/NOTES), a mathematically defined version of the language formulated in part by some of the original language developers; and Objective Caml (OCaml; see http://caml.inria.fr), an offshoot version from the original ML to which features are added at will without being defined in a standard. Other related languages include Extended ML (EML; see http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/dts/eml) and Alice ML (www.ps.uni-sb.de/alice).
ML and its variants are purely functional languages and don't allow any assignment to storage. These functional languages are difficult to program in, but their programs are much more amenable to formal analysis and proofs of correctness.
• Unified Modeling Language: UML is a standard notation for modeling real-world objects as part of developing an object-oriented design methodology. UML is used for modeling application structure, behavior and architecture, along with business processes and data structures. Vendors of many computer-aided software engineering products support the language. UML was developed from methodologies that also describe the processes in developing and using the model. (www.uml.org)
• YAML Ain't Markup Language: YAML is an international collaboration to make a data-serialization language that is both readable by humans and computationally powerful. (www.yaml.org)

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