Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by agumonkey 1637 days ago
Didn't pascal have a way to persist/reload records. Not SQL-like but still something.

Also it's interesting you mention cobol. It really was a cool feature.

3 comments

Pascal's records are basically like C's structs: you can use them to make a database (and many did) but there isn't any real support from the language, though some implementations may have had their own extensions since the original Wirth Pascal had no support for files at all and the standard had some very limited support.
Not as any kind of standard, or even a popular extension.

Microsoft BASIC implementations for DOS however had ISAM in some of the editions (PDS and VB for DOS) which were similar: you'd declare a struct type, and then open a file with that type as the record type.

I wrote CRUD apps that did this in Turbo Pascal back in the days of MS-DOS. I copied the idea of screen fields that I had seen in DBASE II, and make a set of field editors for each record type, I could put together a database pretty darned quick back in the day.