Operations
A programming language that supports record types usually provides some or all of the following operations:
- Declaration of a new record type, including the position, type, and (possibly) name of each field;
- Declaration of variables and values as having a given record type;
- Construction of a record value from given field values and (sometimes) with given field names;
- Selection of a field of a record with an explicit name;
- Assignment of a record value to a record variable;
- Comparison of two records for equality;
- Computation of a standard hash value for the record.
Some languages may provide facilities that enumerate all fields of a record, or at least the fields that are references. This facility is needed to implement certain services such as debuggers, garbage collectors, and serialization. It requires some degree of type polymorphism.
The selection of a field from a record value yields a value.
Read more about this topic: Record (computer Science)
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