This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 12.226.24.14(talk) at 16:47, 25 August 2016(I deleted the indicated abbreviation for Caché ObjectScript to be COS, which is not true. There is no abbreviated name for this language.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.Revision as of 16:47, 25 August 2016 by 12.226.24.14(talk)(I deleted the indicated abbreviation for Caché ObjectScript to be COS, which is not true. There is no abbreviated name for this language.)
Caché ObjectScript is a part of the Caché database system sold by InterSystems. The language is a functional superset of the ANSI-standard MUMPS programming language. Since Caché is at its core a MUMPS implementation, it can run ANSI MUMPS routines with no change. To appeal as a commercial product, Caché implements support for object-oriented programming, a macro preprocessing language, embedded SQL for ANSI-standard SQL access to M's built-in database, procedure and control blocks using C-like brace syntax, procedure-scoped variables, and relaxed whitespace syntax limitations.
The language has private and public variables and globals. Global has a different meaning in this language than in most; such variables are global across routines, processes, and sessions. Thus, editing a global variable is making permanent and immediate changes to a system-universal database (which survives reboots, etc.). The scope of a private variable is the local function, the scope of a public variable is the entire process. Variables, private and public, may be single elements or complete multi-dimensional arrays.
The great majority of Caché's feature-set is inherited from the ANSI MUMPS standard. See that article for details on how data is represented and the different ways a programmer can think about the data during development.
