From: arne@vajhoej.dk   
      
   On 11/30/2025 4:49 PM, Chris Townley wrote:   
   > On 30/11/2025 21:09, Arne Vajhøj wrote:   
   >> On 11/30/2025 4:04 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:   
   >> The selling point is the automatic persistence of global   
   >> variables:   
   >   
   > Why would you want that?   
      
   It is pretty smart for persistence - instead of various   
   API calls doing SQL or ORM or whatever, then you just let   
   the variable name start with ^ and the system handles   
   both retrieving and storing the data.   
      
   But I guess you wonder over labeling it global variables.   
      
   Well - this is before my time, so this is just guessing.   
      
   When MUMPS were invented then RAM was very expensive. According   
   to Wikipdia then MUMPS first ran on a PDP-7 and PDP-9. And   
   a PDP-9 came standard with 8192 words of RAM. Yuck.   
      
   So having one big program with data in global variables in   
   RAM and calling a bunch of subroutines to work on the data   
   may not have fit into RAM.   
      
   Instead having the global variables on disk and having   
   multiple small standalone programs working on the data   
   may fit better.   
      
   Arne   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)