Mumps MUMPS is an acronym for Massachusettes General Hospital Programming System. First developed in 1967, MUMPS is a database management system and programming language designed to process character based data. The data is stored in sparse hierarchical arrays called Globals. The programming language, commonly referred to as M (or Open M), encourages very compact code. Each of the basic commands can be written as a single letter and intrinsic functions are called with a dollar sign followed by one or two letters. It is also fussy about spaces,sometimes one is need sometimes two. So if I wanted to print the contents of a simple Global (which are prefixed with a carat ^) called TEST the code would look something like this: