Re:The Mumps Programming Language
by int_19h on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @02:09AM
(#13865406)
A lot of what you're describing - in particular, "you access the built-in, persistent database the same way you access regular data structures" - was also true of many DBMS of the dBase era - dBase itself and its clones (Clipper, FoxBase/FoxPro), Paradox etc. But I think they still made better languages than MUMPS.
The biggest difference, it seems, is that instead of key-value stores, you had indexed tables. However, indexes were effectively key maps - there was no SELECT as in SQL (well, there was eventually, but not at first); instead you explicitly specified the index to use - unless you used the default index for that table - and performed a lookup, and it would position the current cursor for that table to the appropriate record. You would then access fields of that record as regular variables:
It might sound weird, but it actually worked really well for stereotypical CRUD form-based desktop apps - your cursor corresponds to the record currently being edited/displayed.
The biggest difference, it seems, is that instead of key-value stores, you had indexed tables. However, indexes were effectively key maps - there was no SELECT as in SQL (well, there was eventually, but not at first); instead you explicitly specified the index to use - unless you used the default index for that table - and performed a lookup, and it would position the current cursor for that table to the appropriate record. You would then access fields of that record as regular variables:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/library/bz5ys9dy(v=vs.80).a...
It might sound weird, but it actually worked really well for stereotypical CRUD form-based desktop apps - your cursor corresponds to the record currently being edited/displayed.