Record (computer science) Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

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

One common meaning is simply "an item in a database". In relational databases these are also called tuples, a term inherited from relational algebra.

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 a record a struct or structure; object-oriented languages such as Java, Smalltalk, and C++ often keep their records hidden inside objects (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.

An array of records can sometimes be implemented more efficiently with a parallel array.




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