[todd8]

Yes you are right, records have been around for a long time.

COBOL was a popular, very early language supporting hierarchical data of different types. This dates back to approximately 1960.

FORTRAN didn’t have records other than I/O “records” (at least for the first 20 years). ALGOL-60 didn’t have records. Algol-68 did have records, however Algol-68 wasn’t in very widespread use. I never had an opportunity to use it; compiler technology at that time wasn’t really ready for such a challenging language. Algol-68 may not have had widespread use, but a number of it’s features made their way into influential languages like C, Pascal, and Simula. These languages did have records.

As I recall, IBM’s PL/1 did have records, I seem to recall using them in the 70’s in a PL/1 program. PL/1 was kind of an amalgamation of FORTRAN and COBOL’s features.

[cmrdporcupine]

In the end... Pascal was/is hugely influential, and, yeah, it called these kinds of things "Records." But the funny thing is it's been so long since I wrote Pascal or Modula-2 that when I first heard the term "Record" in the context of Java I never made the connection.