Documentation

The MDH (Multi-Dimensional and Hierarchical) Toolkit is a collection of C++ classes and code to emulate many Mumps features in C++.

The Mumps Language

Beginning in 1966, the Mumps programming language (also referred to as M), was developed by Neil Pappalardo and others in Dr. Octo Barnett's lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital on a PDP-7. It was later ported to a number of machines including the PDP-11 and VAX.

Mumps is a general purpose programming language that supports a novel, native, hierarchical database facility. The acronym stands for the Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-programming System. It is widely used in financial and clinical applications and remains to this day the basis of the U.S. Veterans Administration's computerized medical record system VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture), the largest of its kind in the world.

As originally conceived, Mumps differs from other mini-computer based languages by providing a:

1. Hierarchical database facility. Mumps data sets are not only organized along traditional sequential and direct access methods, but also as trees whose data nodes can addressed as path descriptions in a manner which is easy for a novice programmer to master in a relatively short time;
2. Flexible and powerful string manipulation facilities. Mumps built-in string manipulation operators and functions provide programmers with access to efficient means to accomplish complex string manipulation and pattern matching operations.

Syntactically, Mumps is based on an earlier language named JOSS and has an appearance similar to early versions of BASIC which was also based on JOSS. Another feature of Mumps which distinguished it from other language environments at the time was its ability to run multiple applications and serve multiple users concurrently on very primitive computers.

Over the years, a number of implementations were developed. Many of these are now extinct or have evolved considerably from their original base. As the early implementations began to differ linguistically from on another, an effort to standardize Mumps began. This culminated in the 1977 ANSI standard for Mumps (X11.1-1977).

The standards effort continued until 1995 when the last standard was published (see: American National Standard for Information Systems - Programming Languages - M ANSI/MDC X11.1-1995). Since then, the standards writing Mumps Development Committee has disbanded and there have been no new standards developed. At present, the 1995 standard has lapsed in the United States but remains in effect as ISO (ISO/IEC 11756:1999). Also, as of 1995, there were related standards either published or in development for Mumps system interconnections (X11.2), a graphical kernel definition (X11.3), X-window binding (X11.4), TCP-IP binding (X11.5) and a windowing API (X11.6). These have also lapsed in the United Sates but some are still in effect at ISO.

GPL Mumps is distributed in source code for Linux and Cygwin (for MS Windows). It is licensed under the Gnu General Public License V2 and may be redistributed subject to the conditions of the license. The package includes a robust Mumps interpreter, a Mumps compiler (not up to date) and a Mumps-like class library for C++ (MDH).

For the most part, GPL Mumps follows the 1995 standard but those areas where it deviates from the standard are highlighted in the documentation. In addition to supporting a builtin database, the GPL Mumps permits storage of the Mumps global arrays in relational database management systems. At present, these include MySQL and PostgreSQL. When the globals are stored in one of the RDBMS systems, they become ACID compliant and accessible by means of SQL queries.

Also available is an document indexing, classification and retrieval sytem using the vector space model written in Mumps.

Mumps Programming Tutorial

1. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 1
   https://youtu.be/7j91ioSlZ8U

2. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 2
   https://youtu.be/qYTRShO_-ls

3. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 3
   https://youtu.be/kFQL6X4zS0w

4. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 4
   https://youtu.be/tfsf7g3R5r0

5. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 5
   https://youtu.be/bApNg_n-ZFk

6. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 6
   https://youtu.be/BuA7AS1NAa0

7. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 7
   https://youtu.be/F_zb2pVuXaU

8. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 8
   https://youtu.be/DWilGkzGIqw

9. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 9
   https://youtu.be/DWilGkzGIqw

10. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 10
    https://youtu.be/S_ys4GexsdQ

11. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 11
    https://youtu.be/QFv2BquU4DY

12. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 12
    https://youtu.be/5bzfWrSyXJc

13. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 13
    https://youtu.be/iRcR3_5rK1M

14. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 14
    https://youtu.be/WhvgJbHS9Ik

15. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 15
    https://youtu.be/E0jWvyBXPZY

16. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 16
    https://youtu.be/VMoXa_ZK4t4

17. Mumps Programming Language Tutorial Part 17
    https://youtu.be/xXVm29Z6kcY

18. Mumps programming example: word dictionary & count program
    https://youtu.be/V3ZV3Zga5jU

19. Mumps programming example: word dictionary & count Part 2
    https://youtu.be/UA3cef_WXmw

20. Mumps Document Term Matrix example
    https://youtu.be/e756GyRAnNI

21. Global Array Navigation
    https://youtu.be/Nt2_ULtm8_c

22. Arithmetic operations in Mumps
    https://youtu.be/xWBB2L5EhM0

23. RDBMS Medical DB Model vs Mumps
    https://youtu.be/DxMzmaVDs5g

24. Building a MeSH Tree
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObUAklaia1Y

25. MeSH Tree Print Programs
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ZVnYeQROc

26. MeSH Index Program
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w4PpEU9EBM

27. MeSH Titles Program
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA3xneZNHPY

28. Find MeSH Terms and Sub-Terms
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZOiN5ZF7MQ

29. Installing Mumps with the Native Database
    https://youtu.be/MvGPiySRTdU

30. Example: Simple programs to add 10 numbers in Mumps
    https://youtu.be/2vYtMVA-GRo

31. Example: Reading multiple values from a single line
    https://youtu.be/JR01YIy1R9w

32. Example: constants
    https://youtu.be/xEnDYZnogQ4

33. Inverse Document Frequencies
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHPwftg_PlI

34. Weighting Terms in Documents
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zeqx5MSu3s

35. Building Mumps Desktop Apps with GTK/Glade Part 1

36. Building Mumps Desktop Apps with GTK/Glade Part 2

37. Building Mumps Desktop Apps with GTK/Glade Part 3