This assignment is appropriate for a group of students to do together. It involves a task of reasonable size, which must be partitioned so that each member of the group knows just what to do and so that, when all parts are put together, the final solution works correctly. The idea is to produce an "index" for a book. This involves
1. The creation of files, using the sequential files available in C.
2. The creation of appropriate functions that will allow the records of a file to be accessed randomly, or in sequential order, by key.
One file, the book file, is to consist of records that represent the pages of a book. Each page contains one hundred lines, and each line consists of one hundred characters. The key consists of a page number and a line number. A second file, the dictionary file, is to consist of records representing words to appear in an index for the book represented on the book file. When the solution is run, it should use a scaled-down version of the book file, which will consist of a few pages of ten lines and twenty characters each, with the dictionary containing relatively few words (say, twenty-five).
The dictionary file is to be a sequential file, with the file implemented using B-trees. Instead of a disk, assume that enough internal memory exists to store the book file. The index for the book should be output so that the words of the index appear in alphabetical order, followed by the page and line numbers on which the word appears in the book. Also, an input file consisting of page and line numbers appearing in random order should result in an output consisting of the text for each record of this input file.