'Is an instance of a record data type the same thing as records organising a binary file?
In a chapter of a book I am reading, composite user-defined data types are discussed. An example of them is record data type:
Record data type: a data type that contains a fixed number of components, which can be of different types.
As an example, a record could be used for a program using employee data. Pseudocode for defining the type could be:
TYPE
TEmployeeRecord
DECLARE EmployeeFirstName : STRING
DECLARE EmployeeFamilyName : STRING
DECLARE DateEmployed : DATE
DECLARE Salary : CURRENCY
ENDTYPE
Later on, file organisation and how data is stored on a storage device is discussed. The book states that:
In everyday computer usage, a wide variety of file types is encountered— graphic, word-processing, etc. Whatever the file type, the content is stored using a defined binary code that allows the file to be used in the way intended. For the very specific task of storing data to be used by a computer program, there are only two defined file types: text file or a binary file.
However, the way the book describes how a binary file is organised is very confusing.
The organisation of a binary file is based on the concept of a record. A file contains records and each record contains fields. Each field consists of a value.
What does the book mean by a record here? Is it an instance of the record data type? Or is it talking about a row in a table in a database? Or is a row in a database stored in the memory as a record data type defined by the 'user' (not the programmer) of a software like Access or MySQL? Or does a record here refers to another totally different, abstract idea?
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