record data structures

Now we can manipulate the data quite easily. And let's now say that there are two people whose data we want to store and manage.

This is still manageable, but it is becoming clear that there is no particular relationship between the variables other than the clues given to us by the identifiers.

In a more complex program, this is going to get very messy.

There are many solutions to this problem and a popular one is to create a record data structure.

A record data structure allows a programmer to store related data together under one identifier, similar to an array.

The difference is that a record allows data of different types to be stored together under one identifier.

To illustrate this concept we will design a new data type in Pseudocode:

We can now create a record of this type and assign data to the properties in the record:

And we can continue into programming:

You may have thought ahead and decided that we could have a type called Student as above and then declare an array of Student records:

Reminder: in pseudocode, the lowerbound of an array is often 1. The upper bound can be what you need it to be!

Can you visualise the above array? Take a moment to think about it. What does each element in the array store?

Now, let's imagine many records have been added to the array. Let's perform a linear search for a specific name in the array:

Do you think you could rewrite this algorithm to implement a more efficient linear search?!