How were business apps done in BASIC back in the day?
Nowadays, and even back then, there are/were more specialized tools focused on doing things like Inventory, and Accounting, and other back office systems.
A key component of most, if not all, of these systems was some kind of (likely) B+Tree indexing system for the data records on disk. An index system was pretty much a built in feature of COBOL (and one reason for its popularity in this space).
But, while there were certainly some external libraries that could be used to add that indexing capability to BASIC, many BASICs did not come with that capability built-in.
None of the MS BASICs did. The original DEC BASIC-PLUS did not have a B-Tree facility. CBASIC, a compiled BASIC, certainly didn't. Even more modern "QBASIC", QuickBasic, never provided that facility out of the box. Many of the third party BASICs lacked it as well.
Yet, applications were built, BASIC was quite popular for these applications.
Curious if anyone here was deep in the trenches in this space back in the day, and what tips and tricks and techniques were used to work around the lack of a generic indexing facility.
Clearly you could use the idea of a "primary key" (i.e. the record number), but seems like there's a lot of scanning and sorting to get beyond that. Did you make your own ad hoc indexes? Hashing?
And, of course, while I mention BASIC, other languages suffered the same issue, but had similar facilities for record I/O that BASIC has (i.e random records fetching and updating). So in that sense the techniques were mostly universal.
Nowadays, and even back then, there are/were more specialized tools focused on doing things like Inventory, and Accounting, and other back office systems.
A key component of most, if not all, of these systems was some kind of (likely) B+Tree indexing system for the data records on disk. An index system was pretty much a built in feature of COBOL (and one reason for its popularity in this space).
But, while there were certainly some external libraries that could be used to add that indexing capability to BASIC, many BASICs did not come with that capability built-in.
None of the MS BASICs did. The original DEC BASIC-PLUS did not have a B-Tree facility. CBASIC, a compiled BASIC, certainly didn't. Even more modern "QBASIC", QuickBasic, never provided that facility out of the box. Many of the third party BASICs lacked it as well.
Yet, applications were built, BASIC was quite popular for these applications.
Curious if anyone here was deep in the trenches in this space back in the day, and what tips and tricks and techniques were used to work around the lack of a generic indexing facility.
Clearly you could use the idea of a "primary key" (i.e. the record number), but seems like there's a lot of scanning and sorting to get beyond that. Did you make your own ad hoc indexes? Hashing?
And, of course, while I mention BASIC, other languages suffered the same issue, but had similar facilities for record I/O that BASIC has (i.e random records fetching and updating). So in that sense the techniques were mostly universal.