I'm taking the same course. I was frustrated with the SML REPL, learned about rlwrap and wrote this up. Glad it helps. (I just posted the tip to the course's forums as well. Thanks for reminding me.)

I suspected this might be the case. I'm in the same course, too, and I had never even heard of SML before it. I thought to myself, what are the odds of this showing up on Hacker News right now?

Many thanks, regardless! I upvoted your thread in the course general discussion, and I hope any other course takers on HN do to. It would be a shame if the non-hn course takers missed out on the thread (https://class.coursera.org/proglang-2012-001/forum/thread?th...).

Thanks for your contribution! What do you think of the course so far? I had too much fun doing the first homework.

ML itself is interesting, and I think the material for the class is good. I enjoyed the first round of homework - not too easy, but not really too hard either. The tough thing for me will be seeing whether can I maintain the extra work for the full 10 weeks.