Richard Walters - M Programming: A Comprehensive Guide

Initially, the books about M[UMPS] were published by local interest groups and were not for sale in the general bookstores. About 10 years ago, this changed when textbooks about M[UMPS] started to appear in the regular press in German, French, and Dutch. I was extremely happy when, around 1990, two new textbooks appeared which were in English, and were available in the general bookstores. One of those two was the first edition of Dr. Walters The ABCs of MUMPS.

Of course, books about computer languages have one major disadvantage: it takes quite an amount of time to prepare the publication of a book and by the time a book is printed, the text in that book is already showing its age. The subject matter of computer languages evolves so rapidly that it takes only a couple of years for books to change from the latest and greatest to largely obsolete. The books about M[UMPS] that appeared five years ago are no exception in this context. Consequently, I was delighted when Dr. Walters told me he was working on a revision of the ABCs. The M[UMPS] language has made a number of important leaps forward over the past five years, and the first edition of the ABCs, of course, only describes the language as it was when that edition was published.

This new edition still describes the elementary building blocks of the M[UMPS] language. These havent changed. But the importance of this new edition is that it also describes those new language elements that have been added over the past five years. Several of the commands and functions in the language have been extended to offer new capabilities, and a couple of completely new sections have been added to the language. The publication of this book is scheduled to occur only a couple of months after ANSI gave its final approval to the 1995 version of the standard for this language and I am happy to have been able to assist Dr. Walters in ensuring that as many as possible of the new additions to the language are covered in this book.

Thirty years have passed since a modest system in a lab of a university hospital was given the nickname MUMPS. This system has now evolved to a programming environment with international acceptance. Currently, many people still call the language by its original name, and probably equally many prefer to call it by the name M. Whatever name people use for the language, its strengths are still the same: the language offers access to a multiuser database, it offers all the flexibility of a programming language, it offers all the capabilities of a preprogrammed environment to enforce carefully defined access, both in the limiting sense of security requirements and in the extending sense of opening up sources of information for those who need it for their daily activities. The programming language can be used to maintain purely hierarchic databases, as well as purely relational ones, as well as any form or type of hybrid. Certainly, these capabilities are also available in the systems that can be found advertised in the popular software press. Unfortunately, most of these offer only some of these advantages, and those that have the capability to offer all the same benefits do so only if they are implemented in an environment that is tailored to fit. M[UMPS] still offers its advantages regardless of its environment, and will continue to do so.

The programming language was originally mainly used in hospital environments, and currently primarily finds its application in banking environments, stock exchanges, libraries, travel agencies, hotel administration, pizza delivery and, of course, diverse medical systems are still supported as ever before.

It is obvious to me that the M[UMPS] language is still thriving, and I am delighted to see continued updates in the literature about this language.

Ed de Moel, Chairman MUMPS Development Committee

November 1996