The MUMPS 76 Primer – anniversary edition

I did most of Advent of Code last year code golfing in MUMPS (running on Caché), with the additional challenge on up to and including day 7 doing without literals - that's to say no numbers and no strings. It was good fun - https://github.com/dominique-m-aoc/aoc-2025/blob/main/day03p... for day three part 1 for example. Or day 7 part 2 where the alphanumeric chars spell a story with only two nonsense words, with almost all the chars being on their own: https://github.com/dominique-m-aoc/aoc-2025/blob/main/day07p... It is a neat language but even more so a neat overall system and bag of concepts that I feel annoyed we haven't seen more of...

I’ve been working on a project to celebrate the anniversary of MUMPS and its first standard.

For those unfamiliar, MUMPS is an imperative language famously born at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1966. Its defining characteristic is that the language and the database are deeply integrated, acting as an early NoSQL database decades before the term existed.

See here for more information about the project: https://github.com/rochus-keller/mumps/

There are pre-compiled versions of my MUMPS 76 interpreter in case you want to play with it.

obligatory reference: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/a_case_of_the_mumps