awk

Right, "the one true awk" corresponds to a book written in 1988, very explicity. https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk I was incorrect about 30 years. It's actually 35. You were the one that that said POSIX awk to begin with, I was using your terms. I understand what you meant, why don't you? As far as shitting on the GMU tools, I don't think I've seen someone do that in decades, especially just referencing the bottom of the man page like that. As far as speed, I don't know how you're using these tools, but if gawk is your bottleneck and not i/o, there's probably smarter ways to do things. This is not a productive conversation. You can live life however you want and if you're happy than I'm happy. We are definitely at an impasse. I'm off to bed.

Awk is awesome! Glad that they are looking to modernize the book. It wasn't really necessary, all the code examples in the original edition of the book still run just fine, although some are somewhat dated, like printing ASCII bar graphs. They also had examples of writing VMs, parsers and interpreters in the book, which run on modern implementations.[0] The language has some quirks. To declare temporary variables, it's common practice to add extra arguments to functions that won't be used. And traversal of associative arrays is implementation-dependent. I'm not sure what the situation is regarding locale and UTF-8 support. EDIT: Looks like Brian Kernighan added Unicode support last year.[1] [0] https://github.com/siraben/awk-vm/blob/master/vm.awk [1] https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk/commit/9ebe940cf3c652b0e37...