Re: MV Keys

Oh, my God! I'm having a flash-back. Urgh! Ungh! I thought I'd seen my last line of COBOL back in the early-mid '80s. Don't drop the deck! ...Arrrgh! Did you desk check it? Oh, no! I forgot a period, another half day wasted.

"dawn" <dawnwolthuis_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:1141397064.340312.148370_at_j33g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> Marshall Spight wrote:
>> dawn wrote:
>> >
>> > I'm catching up, but I don't think this is what Codd meant by the
>> > phrase "repeating group." We used to use "repeating group" to refer to
>> > data defined with an OCCURS clause in COBOL, for example.
>>
>> Since I'm a languages geek, I can maybe understand what you mean
>> if you use terminology based on such languages as C, C++, Java,
>> Fortran, Ratfor, SML, Haskell, Lisp, Scheme, Prolog, Eiffel, Erlang,
>> Icon, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, C#, BASIC, Clean, Nice, Scala,
>> Sawzall, Javascript, Mercury, Sather, Oz, OOK*, Turing machines,
>> or the lambda calculus.
>>
>> COBOL, not so much.
>
> OK, but that's my language of choice ;-)
>
>> What, may I ask, is an OCCURS clause?
>
> I would have called it an array, but thought there could be a nuance
> worth capturing in that it is within a record definition. IIRC
> (haven't actually looked at COBOL since 1989) you might define a
> record for a file (such as VSAM) like
>
> 01 MYRECORD.
> 03 FIRSTNAME PIC X(18).
> 03 LASTNAME PIC X(36).
> 03 EMAILS PIC X(60) OCCURS 10.
> 03 PHONES OCCURS 40.
> 05 PHONETYPE PIC X.
> 05 PHONENUMBER PIC X(10).
>
> Both EMAILS and PHONES would be repeating groups in this record. --dawn
>
Received on Fri Mar 03 2006 - 22:53:18 CET