<
language> (Or "M") Massachusetts General Hospital Utility
Multi-Programming System.
A programming language with extensive tools for the support of
database management systems.
MUMPS was originally used for
medical records and is now widely used where multiple users
access the same databases simultaneously, e.g. banks, stock
exchanges, travel agencies, hospitals.
Early
MUMPS implementations for
PDP-11 and
IBM PC were
complete
operating systems, as well as programming
languages, but current-day implementations usually run under a
normal host
operating system.
A
MUMPS program hardly ever explicitly performs low-level
operations such as opening a file - there are programming
constructs in the language that will do so implicitly, and
most
MUMPS programmers are not even aware of the {operating
system} activity that
MUMPS performs.
Syntactically
MUMPS has only one data-type: strings.
Semantically, the language has many data-types: text strings,
binary strings,
floating point values,
integer values,
Boolean values. Interpretation of strings is done inside
functions, or implicitly while applying mathematical
operators. Since many operations involve only moving data
from one location to another, it is faster to just move
uninterpreted strings. Of course, when a value is used
multiple times in the context of arithmetical operations,
optimised implementations will typically save the numerical
value of the string.
MUMPS was designed for portability. Currently, it is possible
to share the same
MUMPS database between radically different
architectures, because all values are stored as text strings.
The worst an implementation may have to do is swap pairs of
bytes. Such multi-CPU databases are actually in use, some
offices share databases between
VAX,
DEC Alpha,
SUN,
IBM PC and
HP workstations.
Versions of
MUMPS are available on practically all
hardware,
from the smallest (
IBM PC,
Apple Macintosh,
Acorn
Archimedes), to the largest
mainframe. MSM ({Micronetics
Standard
MUMPS}) runs on
IBM PC RT and
R6000; DSM (Digital
Standard
Mumps) on the
PDP-11,
VAX,
DEC Alpha, and
Windows-NT;
Datatree MUMPS from
InterSystems runs on
IBM PC; and
MGlobal MUMPS on the
Macintosh.
Multi-
platform versions include
M/SQL, available from
InterSystems,
PFCS <
mumps@pfcs.com> and
MSM.
Greystone Technologies' GT/M runs on
VAX and
DEC Alpha.
This is a compiler whereas the others are
interpreters.
GT/SQL is their
SQL pre-processor.
ISO standard 11756 (1991). ANSI standard: "
MUMPS Language
Standard", X11.1 (1977, 1984, 1990, 1995?).
The
MUMPS User's Group was the
M Technology Association.
Usenet newsgroups:
news:comp.lang.mumps.
(2003-06-04)