My intention was to present the MUMPS 76 standard so it can be appreciated by today's software engineers; it should be obvious that this is a historical treatise, not a guide for today's systems; as mentioned elsewhere, MUMPS 76 was designed to work on PDP machines with 8K to 24K of core memory. Your coercion concerns apply to any dynamically/weakly typed language, and the same coercion-class bugs are rampant in JavaScript, Perl, PHP, and shell scripting, all of which survived and thrived. MUMPS made deliberate simplicity trade-offs to be usable in 4K of memory in the 1960s. Many early languages made the same choice. And I appreciate that you regard me as presidential candidate.