MUMPS

The Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System, abbreviated as MUMPS or just M, is a programming language that is absolutely unique in its shittiness. Unfortunately, although it's constructed as one of those shit esoteric languages like Brainfuck or Befunge, people actually use it.

	“	M is a lousy language with one great data type.	„
	—Steve J. Morris, as quoted in the MUMPS FAQ, part 1

The data type he's talking about is the string, which is the ONLY data type in MUMPS. That's right: strings are implicitly converted into numbers while performing mathematical operations.

	“	The primary design goal [of] MUMPS was to create code that, once written, can never be maintained by anyone ever again. [...] A more apt name for the language certainly would have been EXPLOSIVE-DIARRHEA.	„
	—Alex Papadimoulis, writing for The Daily WTF

Code samples

A Hello World program in MUMPS looks like this:

hello()
  write "Hello, World!",!
  quit

As TOW explains, the ,! part creates a newline for reasons that are totally obvious. The quit part is necessary because the MUMPS compiler doesn't give a fuck about whether or not you want a routine to end. This is also painfully apparent in the very short routine size limit, which forces most MUMPS programs to consist of a bunch of routines like ASDF1, ASDF2, and ASDF3, all chained together with GOTO statements.

Alternative version:

hello() w "Hello, World!",! q

This last program takes advantage of the fact that you can abbreviate keywords like if in one letter, like i. So does this one, which prints out a beautifully formatted table of prime numbers:

f p=2,3:2 s q=1 x "f f=3:2 q:f*f>p!'q  s q=p#f" w:q p,?$x\8+1*8

External links

• TOW on MUMPS
• "A Case of the MUMPS" from The Daily WTF
• The MUMPS FAQ

MUMPS is part of a series on Softwarez Visit the Softwarez Portal for complete coverage.