Beginning COBOL for Programmers

CHAPTER 8

Advanced Sequential Files

In the previous chapter, you saw how sequential files are declared, written, and read. In this chapter, you continue your exploration of sequential files by examining advanced issues such as multiple-record-type files, print files, and variable-length records.

The previous chapter dealt with sequential files that contained only fixed-length records of a single record type. This chapter shows how a file may have records of different lengths either because the file contains a number of different types of fixed-length records or because it contains variable-length records. The discussion of files that contain ...