Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
account number file consists of nine fields. We must then thoroughly describe each field.
This gives us some keywords. The first is
define
and the others are
structure
,
integer
,
decimal
,
signed
and
character
.
The actual program code to describe the account file record and its makeup is as
follows:
define
acctfile
record
account-record
structure
account-number
integer(
9)
last-name
character
(18)
first-name
character
(15)
middle-initial
character
street-address
character
(25)
city
character
(15)
state
character
(2)
zip-code
integer(
5)
balance
signed
decimal
(6.2)
Note that the ten lines above are not a program, which we'll get to in the next
chapter. Let us begin with the first line,
define
fil
e
acctfile
record
account-record
structure
.
The keyword
define
spells out to the program the name of the file - indicated by what follows the keyword
file
and what fields make up each record. That's what the keyword
record
is for. The field
account-record
is a variable, as are the nine fields in the record that follow. The record is related to these
fields by the keyword
structure
which says that the variable
account-record
consists of nine fields. The end of the record is indicated by the next occurrence of the
keyword
define
,
or some keyword, such as
read
.
