language (Or "M") Massachusetts General Hospital Utility
Multi-Programming System.
A programming language with extensive tools for the support of
medical records and is now widely used where multiple users
access the same databases simultaneously, e.g. banks, stock
exchanges, travel agencies, hospitals.
languages, but current-day implementations usually run under a
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
operatingsystem activity that MUMPS performs.
Syntactically MUMPS has only one data-type: strings.
Semantically, the language has many data-types: text strings,
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
Versions of MUMPS are available on practically all
hardware,
ISO standard 11756 (1991). ANSI standard: "MUMPS Language
Standard", X11.1 (1977, 1984, 1990, 1995?).
(2003-06-04)