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record

computing

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computer programming language

  • In computer programming language: COBOL

    …data, and COBOL introduced the record data structure for such tasks. A record clusters heterogeneous data—such as a name, an ID number, an age, and an address—into a single unit. This contrasts with scientific languages, in which homogeneous arrays of numbers are common. Records are an important example of “chunking”…

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  • In computer programming language: Data structures

    …collection of data, and the record, a heterogeneous collection. An array may represent a vector of numbers, a list of strings, or a collection of vectors (an array of arrays, or mathematical matrix). A record might store employee information—name, title, and salary. An array of records, such as a table…

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function in database

  • In database

    …may be broken down into records, each of which consists of one or more fields. Fields are the basic units of data storage, and each field typically contains information pertaining to one aspect or attribute of the entity described by the database. Records are also organized into tables that include…

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Introduction References & Edit History Related Topics

byte, the basic unit of information in computer storage and processing. A byte consists of 8 adjacent binary digits (bits), each of which consists of a 0 or 1. (Originally, a byte was any string of more than one bit that made up a simple piece of information like a single character. Thus, for example, there were four- or six-bit bytes, but eventually the standard settled on eight bits.) The string of bits making up a byte is processed as a unit by a computer; bytes are the smallest operable units of storage in computer technology. A byte can represent the equivalent of a single character, such as the letter B, a comma, or a percentage sign, or it can represent a number from 0 to 255. Because a byte contains so little information, the processing and storage capacities of computer hardware are usually given in gigabytes (GB; one billion bytes) and terabytes (TB; one trillion bytes). Because the byte had its roots in binary digits, originally one kilobyte was not 1,000 bytes but 1,024 bytes (1,024 = 210), and thus one megabyte (MB) was 1,024 × 1,024 bytes and so on. However, with some notable exceptions such as the Microsoft Windows operating system, the computer industry has switched over to decimal prefixes, in which prefixes denote a thousandfold increase in bytes.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Erik Gregersen.