Re: More on RE/RS

At 19:49 26/09/96 GMT, Christopher R. Maden wrote:
>[Charles Goldfarb]
>> The standard (and the Handbook) recognize the possibility that
>> records might not exist in some storage formats. In those cases, you
>> can assign RE/RS out of existence. But when records actually exist,
>> you *cannot* evade handling them by not assigning RE/RS and sweeping
>> them under the rug (where "rug" = application or entity manager).
>
>But when *do* "records actually exist"?  There is a perception evident
>here, and one that I had always taken for granted, that the data
>between carriage returns (a "line") was to be interpreted as a record.
>But I can't find anything in 8879 to that effect!  IBM mainframes have
>records; they are definitely records, and nothing else.  But in an
>ASCII text file, from UNIX, DOS, or Macintosh, what constitutes a
>record, normatively?  I think 8879 does not prescribe a particular
>behavior in this regard.

See the definition of record in 8879 (clause 4.252).  I don't think it
leaves any doubt that a record is intended to correspond to an input-line.

James