The Record (computer science) reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Record (computer science)

In computer science, a record can be any of several different things.

One common meaning is simply "an item in a database". There is a wide variety of such "records", but the most common type (the one relational databases support) is an instance of the other kind of record.

Another common computer science meaning of record is an aggregation of several items of possibly different types; the items being aggregated are called fields and are usually identified or indexed by field labels. Generally, the fields in a record are related, all describing different properties of a single conceptual object. For example, we might have a record describing an employee, with a string field with the label name, and an integer field with the label age. Usually there are many aggregate objects created with the same structure, in this case one for each employee.

C calls these "structs"; object-oriented languages such as Java, Smalltalk, and C++ often keep their records hidden inside "objects", or "class instances"; languages in the ML family simply call them records. COBOL was the first programming language to support records directly; Algol got it from COBOL, and Pascal got it, more or less indirectly, from Algol.

See also:

• Domain Name System for a list of record types in the DNS

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