Also note that Caché developers will be able to choose to use Atelier even if the Caché server is not yet on v2016.2 or a later version. Steps:

• Use a local installation of v2016.2 integrated with their chosen source control system to edit classes and routines.
• Use Atelier’s export feature to export the file(s) to our standard XML format, and import those files on the Caché server.

Each developer can choose between familiarity with Studio and easy integration with the server (with perhaps no integration with source control), or familiarity with Eclipse and easy integration with source control (with an extra step or two to integrate with the Caché server).

This is interesting stuff and it's good to revisit this as ObjectScript evolves. In the old days, there was advice about things like this:

• set a=1, b=1, c=1 was faster than set (a, b, c) =1
• if a]"" was faster than if a'=""
• etc.

But we always reminded people that these things could change from platform to platform, and that extra database references were usually much costlier than the differences between coding things one way vs another.

So, Tim, if you've got the time, please tell the Community if your tests show different values on Windows vs Linux vs Unix vs OS X. And (this might be harder), give us your opinion on a "tipping point" or a "when to care about this point"; that is, if the delimited or list string has fewer than N pieces/items, it really doesn't matter which method is used, but above N, use the $listlength method, and above M, use $listnext. Something like that.

Very good article that really shows the benefits of $sequence. Do you have an explanation for why the calls to LastName() and FirstName() went from 16.8 sec (using $increment) down to 8.2 sec (using $sequence)?

Also, there's a typo: "acquisitoin" should be "acquisition".

Usually the variable subscripts in a global will have a name of some kind, known to the developers that wrote or support the application. The name may also be known to the users of the application. I recommend using that name for the property, such as "EmpID" or "EmployeeID" rather than something generic like "Sub2".

Another variation is where the USA.Person class is marked Abstract (so there are no objects/rows that are only Persons). For Kyle's Option #1, we'll make USA.President, USA.Senator, and USA.Representative subclasses of USA.Person. All the politicians will be stored together in the ^USA.PersonD global, with each type marked using the "~USA.President~"-style syntax. Without the bitmap extent index, finding all Senators requires looking through the entire global. With it, there is a bitmap index for each type of politician. Note that this variation provides 4 tables: Person (showing the common data for all politicians), and President, Senator, Representative (showing all the data for each type, including the Person data).

For Kyle's Option #2, the subclasses inherit from %Persistent and USA.Person, and each type of politician is stored separately from the other types. When doing this, you would normally specify [NoExtent] for the USA.Person class. There won't be a Person table in this case.

I thought IKnow required a special license. Can I really do all of this with my regular old Caché license?

Does this work with character streams also?

One clarification that might help you: the "Ensemble Controller" Service is not an Ensemble process, so the user assigned to that Service doesn't affect what you're asking about. The "Caché/Ensemble Controller" Service is simply something that allows you to start/stop the local Caché or Ensemble. It's just like start/stop on the Launcher (the cube or the E).

And don't forget about using ! or $ to load the interactive sub-shell.

load interactive subshell

It's like using $zf(-1). You can do !pwd or $dir, for example.

The legacy versions of If and For commands don't use curly braces. But there are no legacy versions of While and Do/While, which require curly braces. So rather than trying to remember which commands use or don't use curly braces, just use curly braces all the time for these, as well as Try/Catch.

Regarding post-conditionals, it's a good habit to put parentheses around the condition, which allows you to put spaces in the condition.

This is valid syntax: set:a=4 y=10

This is valid syntax and more readable: set:(a = 4) y = 10

This is invalid syntax: set:a = 4 y = 10

Both running VMs and containers allow multiple processes inside. I'm not asking you for a deep dive, but can you explain if the mechanism that allows this is the same or similar between VMs and containers, or if they use completely different mechanisms.

This is nice. The only thing I'm wondering about is why there are #dim statements for regular variables? @Timur Safin, why did you include the #dim statements? In my opinion, #dim statements for variables that are not object references are misleading:

1. #dim gives developers that are new to ObjectScript the impression that you must declare all variables like in some other languages. Declaring variables like this is not necessary in ObjectScript.
2. #dim's main purpose is to help Atelier/Studio provide code completion for variables that are object references. If you write this code #dim i as %Integer, and then on the next line you type do i. ,  after the period Atelier/Studio will suggest methods from the %Integer class. If you happen to accept one of the suggestions, the resulting code will not compile. This is because our datatype classes (like %String and %Integer) are not object classes.