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Comment by lowmagnet

12 years ago

Don't really have anything to ask, just wanted to say MUMPS was always neat when I worked for a medical software company and did conversions from and older versions of MUMPS to a Caché server.

I liked the one-letter verb abbreviations, even if it made the code feel somewhat write-only. Data right next to your front-end language was neat too.

The one letter abbreviations are neat.

There's no substantial change in readability in going from:

if condition: print "Hello World"

Or: if (condition) { console.log("Hello, World\n"); };

To:

w:condition "Hello, World",!

I never type 'write', but just 'w' instead. Here's a list of commands: http://docs.intersystems.com/cache20131/csp/docbook/DocBook....

> Data right next to your front-end language was neat too.

Don't know about neat, it made it very hard to separate your model from your logic and while convenient at the time that's also quite a bit of a pain.

  • I guess to me the data thing was neat because you didn't have to bust into another shell just to get at data.

    • Here's how to get a string from your persistent on disk configuration, completely from scratch:

      set foo=^config("foo")

      The '^' means it's a persistent variable.

      Now do this with in the same number of characters either by reading in a flat file or doing an SQL query in any language. I don't think you'll succeed.

      And, yes, it is possible to parameterise this ^config, like so:

      set location="^config"

      set foo=@location@("foo")

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