29 Apr 2000 tony   » (Journeyer)

MUMPS
Interesting. There is a Free version of MUMPS in the works-- FreeM. This presents interesting possibilities. I figure I will install it and see how well it works with VA Fileman. If it doesn't work, maybe I can contribute a little bit.

The ultimate goal would be to get RPMS running on it.

M is the most obtuse language in the universe (save for COBOL, perhaps). It shares one annoying "feature" with Python-- blocking is done with line prefixes. In Python, blocking is managed through whitespace; in M, it's periods (.). So you end up with code that looks like this:

 D  I $G(DIERR) K ^TMP("DDBLST",$J) D CLEAN Q
 .N DOC,DOCSA
 .S DOC=""
 .K ^TMP("DDBLST",$J)
 .F  S DOC=$O(@DDBDSA@(DOC)) Q:DOC=""  D
 ..S DOCSA=@DDBDSA@(DOC)
 ..D LOADCL^DDBR4(DOCSA,"",DOC)
 ..Q
 .Q

In spite of this, I'm beginning to like it.

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