12 Jan
2012
12 Jan
'12
3:52 a.m.
On 2012 Jan 11, at 7:04 PM, Gene Buckle wrote:
On Wed, 11 Jan 2012, Brent Hilpert wrote:
Well, I couldn't really say .. 1978 was about the last time I used
the Microdata/Pick system.
IIRC, EXTRACT() was used to access the fields in a record, the record
perhaps having been READ() from the database; I don't recall the
exact semantics. Would it make sense if it were something like:
value = EXTRACT( record, index1, index2, index3 )
I never saw the x<a,b,c> notation .. syntactic shorthand introduced
later?
The BASIC on the Microdata-REALITY system had
many of these
improvements back in the mid-70's, on a professional/business/mini-
computer platform: structured if-then-else, statement numbers are
optional, indentable, etc. Below is a code snippet from a program
I wrote in 1977/8 (the numbers on the far left are line numbers,
not part of the source).
Known as Pick BASIC or DataBASIC.
70 IF
EXTRACT(FA,2,LC(NP),LC(P)+1)=1 THEN M=M+1;
DA=INSERT(DA,M,0,0EXTRACT(FA,NP,LC(2),1))
I've not seen this notation used (well recently) is the EXTRACT
above equivalent to: IF FA<2,LC(NP),LC(P)+1> THEN.... ?