ALiceML is indeed a rather nice set of extensions to SML. If you pull the code from here:

https://github.com/aliceml/aliceml-alice

and make sure you have all the dependencies installed first, it does build on linux and its fun to play with.

I am currently working on a AliceML derived language and if there is any interest I'll post a note on HN - once its a bit futher down the line.