IMO, programming language and file organizations are
complete different things and should be discussed seperately.
Furthermore, you have direct access on all platforms, including
Windows and Unix; this is not a matter of programming language at all.
And: you have keyed access, because it is easy to implement keyed access
by software on top of the hardware supported direct access; you don't
need hardware support for keyed access ... this was one of the design
errors in history.
I constructed a library of my own which allows to do keyed access from
C programs (different flavors of keys and different flavors of key
access logic),
which is in use at a very large customer of mine since ca. 15 years now and
which outperforms some other libraries and databases doing the same
(on Windows, Unix and z/OS, by the way). On z/OS it is built upon normal
data sets with RECFM=FBS, constant record length, and the physical reads
are done using fseek and fread (functions of the ANSI-C runtime library).
This is no rocket science; the methods how to do this are known since at
least 1972
(not in C then, of course, but, as I said already, it is no matter of
language).
If you want to know more about that, contact me offline.
Just another story: I recently had to document the internal structure of
keyed files
implemented by an old compiler for Windows called RM/COBOL; the compiler
dated from
the mid 1980s and is today marketed by MicroFocus. I was able to understand
the internal structure in the end (there were some informations on a web
site
in Russia) and to write a C program to read the RM/COBOL index files
and convert them to "normal" flat files. That is: there were already
implementations
for keyed files on Windows very early ... when there was no Windows yet ...
only PC-DOS.
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 20.04.2014 02:44, schrieb Clark Morris:
Frankly I agree with Pete Dashwood who posts on comp.lang.cobol when
he says COBOL is dying, though not with quite the same analysis of the
situation that he provides. This is especially true in the Windows and
Unix areas where file organizations that were basic for both IBM and
the BUNCH are not provided (direct and keyed). On the z series, it is
items like this that lend credence to this belief. Clark Morris
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