The System Sort Utility
SORT has one to eight input files, which may be of any valid record length. It has one output file, of any stated length, which may contain from zero to 8 million-plus records.
A sort can contain entire records or just 3-byte addresses which point to records in an associated file. This was called an address-out file or ADDROUT. When using an Addrout, the program read in these 3-byte addresses and then fetched associated records from the master file.
A programmer who wanted the benefits of a System/38-style logical file would use an Addrout with a RETAIN-S disposition:
// LOAD MYPROG
// FILE NAME-ADDROUT,LABEL-WS.SORT,RETAIN-S
// RUN
After the program finishes, the Addrout file doesn't exist anymore. It has been "scratched," or set to RETAIN-S, meaning the system auto-deletes it.
Read more about this topic: IBM System/34, SORT
Famous quotes containing the words system, sort and/or utility:
“Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person’s self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient’s cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“There was something refreshingly and wildly musical to my ears in the very name of the white man’s canoe, reminding me of Charlevoix and Canadian Voyageurs. The batteau is a sort of mongrel between the canoe and the boat, a fur-trader’s boat.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)