Comment by skissane

> FoxPro(dBase family) was a much better take on the idea

xBase is arguably a very different idea - it is based on flat-file/key-indexed databases, akin to VSAM on IBM mainframes, but wrapped in a 4GL. The experience of xBase is very similar to many mainframe 4GLs, what made it distinctive was providing that experience on low-end platforms (it started out on 8-bit CP/M systems, but it was on 16-bit DOS that it really took off)

By contrast, MUMPS has multidimensional associative arrays as a basic data type, and the difference between temporary (in-memory) and persistent (on-disk) arrays is simply whether the variable name is prefixed by a caret. Perl’s tied arrays are close, but tied arrays are a rather peripheral feature of Perl (many Perl code bases never use them), but a central feature of MUMPS