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Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 07/16/07 08:32
Dan Guzman (guzmanda@nospam-online.sbcglobal.net) writes:
>> Mumps, according to Wikipedia: "In MUMPS syntax, some spaces are
>> significant; they are not merely whitespace. There are contexts in
>> which a pair of spaces has a different syntactic significance than a
>> single space" Wow! Amazing, firs time I've ever heard of this
>> archaic language!
>
> As you can probably guess, MUMPS can be a developer's worst nightmare.
> Anecdotal evidence:
> http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS.aspx
Actually, my first programming job ever was in MUMPS! It was only for
the summer though.
The language certainly was weird. In one way it was very high-level: you
did not have to open files and that. Just put a ^ in front of a variable
name, and it was on disk. (I did not knew what a "database" was then.)
On the other hand, some stuff were low-level, for instance the syntax
did not permit indentation.
The most weird thing I did was to implement some search-and-replace
utility. This was not a regular program, but it resided in a global
array (global = on disk). I found that this brought me to the low
level that I did not any more have the luxury of a program counter,
but at the end of each row, I had to explicitly say which "line" to
go to next.
I'm surprised to see that it still around.
--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se
Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx
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