program-name: acctprint.
As you could guess
program-name
is a keyword that we use to indicate the name of our program. We will be writing many programs so we need to distinguish one from another. We do this with that keyword. The name we choose here for our program is a variable,
acctprint.
When we write another program we will have some other name and this is needed to keep the programs separate. Note that we choose this name because we are listing account information. It’s a good idea to make your choice meaningful, as that will help you later when you have so many different programs.
The next few lines should be familiar as they describe the account record and all the fields that make it up. Through the
structure
keyword we can reference any of our nine fields in the record. We need to do this in order to print them on a report. Note that the end of the structure will be determined by the keyword
read.
We then have two more keywords,
read
and
into
in the line
read acctfile into account-record.
The variable following
read
is our account file which has the name
acctfile,
another variable. This line actually does two things. It opens the file and then reads it into the account record layout, making all the fields available to us so we can put them on a report. Using just
read acctfile
would accomplish the same result because of the way the file is defined. The keyword
record
ties the field,
account-record
to the account number file so that any read of that file will result in the data being moved to the field,
account-record.
In the world of computers, there are numerous ways of doing things, which can be good and bad. This I pointed out in an earlier chapter when I talked about systems and rules.