The following programs demonstrate the use of the FIRST clause
    and the SORT clause. These programs sort the employees relation
    in ascending order based on EMPLOYEE_ID. The FIRST 50 statement
    creates a record stream that contains the first 50 records from
    the sorted employees relation. These programs print the employee
    ID and last name of these fifty employee records.

1  –  C Example

    #include <stdio.h>
    DATABASE PERS = FILENAME "PERSONNEL";

    main ( )
    {
    READY PERS;
    START_TRANSACTION READ_ONLY;

    FOR FIRST 50 E IN EMPLOYEES
       SORTED BY E.EMPLOYEE_ID
          printf ("%s  ",E.EMPLOYEE_ID);
          printf ("%s\n",E.LAST_NAME);
    END_FOR;

    COMMIT;
    FINISH;
    }

2  –  Pascal Example

    program first_clause (input,output);
    DATABASE PERS = FILENAME 'PERSONNEL';

    begin
    READY PERS;
    START_TRANSACTION READ_ONLY;

    FOR FIRST 50 E IN EMPLOYEES
       SORTED BY E.EMPLOYEE_ID
          writeln (E.EMPLOYEE_ID, ' ', E.LAST_NAME);
    END_FOR;

    COMMIT;
    FINISH;
    end.