I worked on the MUMPS Standard when I taught in the Medical Informatics Committee at UC San Francisco. When I first encountered the language, I was appalled. For example, in pre-standard MUMPS, lines with no trailing blanks and lines with one trailing blank had a different interpretation. For those interested, https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/hb/nbshandbook118.p.... At one of the standardization meetings, I embarrassed myself by called MUMPS a "viral disease" because of the pathology of the programming language as defined to an audience of people who saw it as a practical tool they used every day. The standard helped stabilize the language. I acquired an appreciation for the incredible skill application programmers can adapt a general purpose extensible language to do their bidding.
