I feel I should respond since I seem to be the monk you are taking about (at least I am the author of 400121 which you site in your list of examples).

To start with, I take issue that Standard ML and Haskell are not well known.

Haskell has been discussed many times recently in the monastary thanks to FoxTrotUniform, his node RFC: A Perlesque Introduction to Haskell, Part One (DRAFT) would be an excellent place to start if you were interested. Also a quick Super Search for 'Haskell" produced a long list of nodes you might find interesting.

As for Standard ML, it is surely not discussed as much as Haskell is here, but it is not unknown in the perl community. You might be interested in Dominus's article on Strong Typing and Perl which has some interesting information on Standard ML around about slide 14.

And of course, there is always Google. I get 1,400,000 results for Haskell and 3,490,000 for Standard ML.

As for the heart of your complaint...

While I understand it might be frustrating to hear reference to something and not see it backed up by URLs or papers, you must understand that it is not always so simple to "just provide a URL".

I am not an academic, and I have a full time job, as well as a wife and 3 kids (2 year old twins among them) and precious little spare time. I have spent the past 7 or so years teaching myself computer science (I majored in Art in college) and have read A LOT of books/sites/papers in that quest for knowledge. And to be honest I just dont have time to keep track of URLs for everything I read in case I need to site it.

I did my best to actually answer your questions in 400138 with a more detailed explaination of what I was talking about. And a simple google search of some of the terms I mention ("Tail Recursion" and "Tail Call Optimization" would be a good place to start) would provide you even more info if you were interested.

In the end, I agree with Happy-the-monk's advice, and just ask the particular monk next time for more clarification. If you don't get a response, then there is always google, but keep in mind that we all have other things to do as well.