Comment by DrJokepu
12 years ago
The first thing I would do if I had to work with something like MUMPS is to write like, a MUMPS LLVM backed or something takes takes a saner language and emits MUMPS, therefore abstracting away the crazy. Why don't you guys do that? Or maybe it's already been done?
It has been done. The most popular form of MUMPS out there, Caché ObjectScript is a superset of MUMPS, so all existing MUMPS code will run on Caché.
But it adds a big bunch of things from error handling to better variable scope to classes to, I wish I was kidding, proper 'if'.
Something that's also been added (to GT.M as well, afaik), because it is so tightly integrated with its database, are tcommit, trollback and tstart as commands, which are strictly speaking database commands and not the kind of thing you'd expect to find in a programming language.
proper 'if'
What (if anything) does MUMPS proper have for 'if'?
'if'.
There's two different types of if constructs, and it's awful, the older one is with a dot syntax.
What's a dot syntax, you may ask? Well, for each level of the if you just prefix a dot:
http://docs.intersystems.com/cache20131/csp/docbook/DocBook....
Makes you want to stab your eyes out. Note also that the comments need to have a dot prefixed as well. That bit me before.
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