Volume 4, number 2, June 1996, pages 25-26

Windills
What will be in the next standard?

by Ed J.P.M. de Moel

In the spring of 1994, the MDC started canvass processes for its standards, five of them in total. For three standards, the process is complete, and the standards have been approved as American National Standards. For the remaining two, the process is complete, the standards have been approved, and the approval has been appealed. A first round of appeals, before the MDC itself, was completed with the recommendation that the MDC should improve some of its internal procedures, but that there was no objection to submitting the canvassed documents to ANSI for approval as American National Standards. The current appeal, by the same individual, are to ANSI's approval of the documents submitted by the MDC. The near future will reveal whether the procedure that led to initial approval of these two standards does indeed reflect the views of the M[UMPS] community. If not, part of the work will have to be re-done.

Meanwhile, work has continued in the MDC. Since the cut-off date for the 1994 canvass documents, 63 additional extensions to three of the five MDC standards have been approved by the committee for inclusion in the next iteration, which is scheduled to be presented for review by the M[UMPS] community around the turn of the century.

If there are possible additions to any of the MDC's standards that are important to you, and that you wish to see in the next iteration of the standards, please let us know. Also, if you wish to be on the list of reviewers (the Canvass List), please inform the MDC Secretariat.

The MDC Secretariat is housed at the MTA offices:
1738 Elton Road, Suite 205
Silver Spring, Maryland 20903
Telephone: 1 (301) 431-4070
Telefax: 1 (301) 431-0017

Already approved

A number of extensions has already been approved for inclusion in these future documents. In all three documents, a number of clarifications will be added, based on questions for clarification that the MDC received from the M[UMPS] community.

The Open MUMPS Interconnect standard has been extended with:

• JOB command may now execute a process in another environment
• I/O can be performed on devices in another environment
• Enhanced performance by including multiple commands in a single message

The Windowing API will be enhanced with:

• Enhanced features for pointer appearance
• Keyboard and pointer button mapping
• Additional key and character codes
• Table gadgets
• Default value of "TRANSPARENT" for fill mode
• Nested ESTART and modal windows
• Implementation specific attributes
• MTERM conformance information
• New list entry gadgets: select, unselect and double click events will also be reported
• Titles for scroll gadgets
• Element title attributes may be modifiable
• Color attributes for foreground and background in display and window attributes
• Ability to specify hot-key characters (mnemonic characters) for choice text in menys and radio button sets
• Ability to specify uni-directional motion
• Ability to specify inheritance of platform default color
• Possibility to stretch characters (symbols) to fit
• Additional display attributes (FFACE, FSIZE and FSTYLE)

The language standard will have the following additions:

• external function libraries will be available; currently defined:
  • general mathemetics
  • trigonometry (both common and hyperbolic)
  • complex mathematics
  • matrix mathematics
  • string manipulation
• Special variable $REFERENCE (to keep track of naked indicator)
• Increased portable string length (510 characters)
• More standardized access to device parameters (through ^$DEVICE and ^$JOB)
• User defineable procedures for I/O on certain devices
• Lower case characters officially allowed in names
• Reverse $QUERY
• Matching "anything but" a certain pattern
• Spaces may occur at the end of a line of code
• KILL command enhancements (more indirection options; KILL "top" and retain subtree; KILL subtree and retain "top")
• Longer names for variables and routines
• Standardized features to create and modify routines
• More character sets
• XOR operator

And what's cooking?

It is hard to predict whether or not the work on additional enhancements will be completed in time for the next cut-off, or that it may be decided to postpone the next cut-off date until after certain work has been completed. That decision will be based on the inputs that we (the MDC) receive from you (the M[UMPS] community).

Candidates in this category (currently being worked on, and not known if work will be completed in time) are:

• Enhancements for object orientation
• Further increased portable string length
• Increased portability size limit for routines
• Increased portability storage limit for local variables
• "Null" device
• Time out on WRITE operations
• Access to local symbol table (two possible approaches in discussion at the moment, will one of those become "it", or will both prevail?)
• OMI extensions for extended $GET and $ORDER
• OMI extensions for internationalization
• Will we solve the If-Then-Else puzzle this iteration? And will we be able to do that in a backward compatible fashion?

As you can see, there still is enough technical work to be done by the MDC. If you don't see any of your desired enhancements in this article, please do let us know: if we don't know about your issues, we won't be able to address them.

Ed de Moel is past chairman of the MDC and works with Jacquard Systems Research. His experience includes developing software for research in medicine and physics. Over the past ten years, Ed's has mostly focused on the production of tools for data management and analysis, and tools for the support of day-to-day operation of medical systems. Ed can be reached by e-mail.