Interesting range of comments on my Mumps piece (http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2005/12/23/mumps_m_prgramming/).

Leaving aside any issues with the future NHS IT systems (which I'll return to later), a lot of readers pointed out that M (or Mumps) was currently widely used in UK Health systems (as well as the USA).

I'm sure that's true (two companies with M-based products, I'm told, are EMIS (http://www.emis-online.com/index.asp) and Protechnic-Exeter (http://www.protechnic-exeter.co.uk/)). However, I'm not sure whether these M systems will survive the introduction of the New NHS IT initiatives.

A more difficult comment to deal with, for me, was excited by my throw-away remark about "post-vonditionality" in M being a bit unusual. Apparently Perl and several other languages implement "post conditions" too, although as I'm neither an M nor a Perl programmer, I can't tell you which does it better <g>

Anyway, Happy Xmas to all my readers!