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<DIV>I do not mean to be insubordinate but I think we probably should give students a little history to "records" if we are going to identify these with specific definitions.<BR>I believe that records were used originally to store data in files - prior to database stores where special files are used to store records - these files of records reflect reasonably well what databases do more effectively. Hence, I am quite curious as to why we will no longer use SQL databases in a language like PHP. I need to ask - are we actually regressing.<BR>What is the actual reasoning that occurred which led to this change in the Software Development course?</DIV>
<DIV>Perhaps someone can explain how this change is a "progression" or an advance over the old programming course.</DIV>
<DIV><BR>This is an interesting piece from Wikipedia and relates to modern languages, classes, objects and "records" :<BR><U><A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_(computer_science">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_(computer_science)</A></U><BR>"An object in object-oriented language is essentially a record that contains procedures specialized to handle that record; and object data types (often called object classes) are an elaboration of record types. Indeed, in most object-oriented languages, records are just special cases of objects.<BR><BR>Records were well established in the first half of the 20th century, when most data processing was done using <A title="Punched card" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card">punched cards</A>. Typically each records of a data file would be recorded in one punched card, with specific columns assigned to specific fields. .... <A title=COBOL href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL"><FONT color=#0645ad>COBOL</FONT></A> was the first widespread programming language to support record types ... The <A class=mw-redirect title="Pascal programming language" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_programming_language"><FONT color=#0645ad>Pascal programming language</FONT></A> was one of the first languages to fully integrate record types with other basic types into a logically consistent type system. IBM's <A class=mw-redirect title=PL/1 href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/1"><FONT color=#0645ad>PL/1</FONT></A> programming language provided for COBOL-style records. The <A class=mw-redirect title="C programming language" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_programming_language"><FONT color=#0645ad>C programming language</FONT></A> initially provided the record concept as a kind of template (<CODE><FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #f9f9f9">struct</FONT></CODE>) that could be laid on top of a memory area, rather than a true record data type."</DIV>
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