(or was this next year? ... this one is more likely)
The DBA took itself out for a lunch in kaštel, to mark the eighth of march. Flowers to the ladies - not just Nena and Milka, but our wives as well. Nothing big nor memorable, except Vanji doing his big jagger act and sniffing the wine they brought, turned it back and asked for a better one.
The one they brought probably felt better to him, it had everything that the books say it should have, he may yet grow into a real con nessour one day, but it also had some component which made me give up on it after just a couple of sips. It smelled somehow acute, and I very quickly remembered where I got acquainted with the smell... it was in a carpet store. When in so many cubic meters of space you have hundreds of square meters of new carpet, still not properly aired, one smells all those chemicals used in production of the fibers... And what, this is now a good wine? Well you can shove all that education of yours, I'm returning to beer.
And I still managed to get some work done on that day, at least a bit, I was drawing (or just editing) the masks for invoice and internal invoice for the production warehousing (the wholesale warehousing was something entirely different, although the only substantial difference is that in production the wares come from the factory floor, and in wholesale from suppliers). The internal invoices were inherited from the times of oours, where the neighbors inside a larger organization would charge each other what they had, a semiproduct or service, which never saw a dime, there was no payment going through a bank, but served for internal purposes, to keep track of costs and gains, so it's known who's mowing [and] who's carrying water.
The next day I see there's some indexs.prg... At first I couldn't believe I'd have generated something like that, specially not a thing which would create indexes from scratch... Well, I didn't, this was something where I just collected the output from the command line - the then mfoxPlus didn't even have windows, it had a command line with a dot prompt, and you executed one line at a time. Very limited, and yet at least ten times more powerful than anything I used so far. A miracle. The app where I did this was still the gas meter reader (v. 22-VI-1989.), now more of a playground, as it won't be used ever, but much better a place to try out the generator tricks than writing a silly dummy app from scratch. This is where I tried out the pmenu.prg and zmenu.prg, which were reports from the menu table, indented by levels, the latter being enriched in the cases when the unosc.prg (in its then incarnation) was called with a mask name as a parameter - it would extract validations, where any, from these masks and list them.
Now why indexs.prg and not index prg... that's from Alan Ford, where at some point Grumf had to pretend to be a cabbie, so he put up a car pretending to be a cab, and put up the sign „TAXSY“...
I find it interesting how in our daily slang we had several words which were either plain wrong or much better than in english, depending. A table we called base (baza), for which the blame lies straight on Ashton-Tate guys, who gave them extension .dbf - database file. Which isn't entirely wrong, these are files belonging to a database, except there was no database. These were just individual tables, one per file, the indexes were in other files, and there was no other connections between them, except in code. There you had to keep track and take care not to open a table with an index belonging to a different table...
What the rest of the world calls form, we called a(n input) mask, which actually exists in english as well, but means quite a different thing. There it's the masking thing for one field, where it limits the things typed in to what's allowed for the field - e.g. the number of digits on either side of the decimal comma, or for date entry, with separate positions for day, month, year. The word 'obrazac' (because we have 'forma' but it means first 'shape', then also any formal description or prescription that applies), because it means exactly a preprinted form with fields, a 'formular' (which then never contained any formula...), but it never got much use. It would appear here and there and its meaning was clear to all, and yet the next time we'd say maska.
For a long time the word for file was datoteka (a data-theque), and even today (2024) the word didn't vanish. It was invented by dr Parezanović, from whose book we learned Fortran back in 1976 (and the book was probably ten years old at the time). There's a monument where the guy least expected it.
A row in a table was called, and still is, a slog, analogous to the typesetter's slog (from 'slagati', 'složiti' - to put together in any orderly manner), which came into widespread use and still is. The word record did not, because it does exist but means only a value higher than any previous, as in sports. It never means anything written down, nor a recording or whatever else it may mean in english. A column, however, is always kolona, never a stubac (as it's called in typesetting; 'stub' means a column, pillar).
The tables we classify as either 'prometna' or 'matična'. Promet is throughput or traffic. A prometna table doesn't really have to contain any transaction, no money needs to move from one pocket to another, or no material needs to be moved or made - for one, table of temperature tracking, or water level, prime numbers... Matica has three meanings - the mainstream of a river, where it carries the fastest, a queen bee, or a nut (not fruit, but the thing that's screwed on a bolt). In that sense, it also means the homeland, the place of origin - the matricular office, register of citizens, is 'matični ured', and there's also 'matica iseljenika' - the emigree home office. Matična is then one that's (in) the core of it, and yet it may not ever be looked up (in)to, or may even take part in the throughput. It seems to me that 'transactional' and 'lookup' were names extracted from a narrow set of applications at the time, and then went on to be used in general case.
21-X-2024 - 25-III-2026