Duke Normandin wrote:
> Now I see how easily "****d References" could quickly produce spaghetti
> code. But why use them at all? Is there a _speed_ advantage? Something
> else?
MUMPS was first developed in the 1960s when storage space was extremely
tight and ****d references reduced the amount of storage space needed.
There
are a number of such "features" in M, some of which are fine and some of
which (especially ****d references) ought to be avoided. One should be
very
careful in designing the database itself so that one does not store things
unnecessarily, especially if on anticipates that it will become very
large.
Source code, on the other hand, is usually a small fraction of the total
amount of data on disk. Today, storage is cheap and programmer time is the
expensive commodity, so one should focus on making code clear rather than
"clever."
|
