I have just started writing documents for the OpenVistA project at SourceForge, http://sourceforge.net/projects/openvista/. It consists of GT.M, a Free (GPL) version of M (aka MUMPS [Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multiprogramming System]), and a massive hospital information system built on it, also under GPL. OpenVistA was created from the US Veterans Administration hospital software under the Freedom of Information Act.
I would like someone to take a look and tell me what we need to do to get this packaged up, as a separate language and as a complete system. I also need help to find out how to create a syntax coloring mode for MUMPS in various text editors. MUMPS was originally an interpreted language that can now be compiled. Its basic datatypes are the string and the associative array, and it has a very simple syntax (no precedence; strict left-to-right execution for binary functions, and strict right-to-left for unary functions). It is of general interest because it has a distributed database system built in, capable of extremely efficient operation on the largest scale. -- Edward Cherlin, Simputer Evangelist Encore Technologies (S) Pte. Ltd. The Village Information Society http://www.ryze.com/go/Cherlin
