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MUMPS

en.wikipedia.org

1–10 of 75 posts

Re: MUMPS

#5
> First appeared 1966; 59 years ago

That's honestly impressive. Though I don't envy people who have to work on this stuff.

Re: MUMPS

#6
> OPERATORS: No precedence, executed left to right, parenthesize as desired. 2+3*10 yields 50.

How do you even come up with this?

Re: MUMPS

#7
post #6

> OPERATORS: No precedence, executed left to right, parenthesize as desired. 2+3*10 yields 50. How do you even come up with this?

It's easier to parse since you can process it in-order, makes for an easier single pass approach.

Re: MUMPS

#8
post #6

> OPERATORS: No precedence, executed left to right, parenthesize as desired. 2+3*10 yields 50. How do you even come up with this?

Simplicity of implementation?

Re: MUMPS

#10
The core idea-a language with a built-in persistent key-value store-is actually pretty cool.

The classic implementation is filled with horrible warts, although arguably many of them were helpful in squeezing a production multiuser system into the tiny resource constraints of the original 1960s implementation platform (18-bit PDP-7, same machine as Unix was birthed on, although Unix soon moved to the 16-bit PDP-11, which was in practice more spacious)

Modern implementations make many of those warts optional, although they still support them for backward compatibility

The biggest problem with the language in practice is that many major code bases (e.g. VistA) are still predominantly written in the legacy extremely terse coding style rather than a more modern readable style. I do wonder why there isn’t more effort put into migrating to a more modern style, especially since with the kinds of tools we have nowadays that migration could be (at least partially) automated.

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