On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 10:35 PM Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > So no, I haven't tried rebuilding this (yet?), and I'm no *nix fiend, > but I do think AWK is a cool tool, maybe cooler than GW-BASIC (don't > kill me!).
AWK is a cool tool. But it's not a full programming language for building stand alone apps. GWBASIC is. AWK (the initials of Alfred Aho, Thomas Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan, the authors) was a tool intended for querying and modifying the contents of text files. It was initially written to perform "one liners", where you invoked awk on a command line with the commands to execute and the data to examine. I attended a talk given by Weinberger decades ago where he described his shock on first seeing a multi-line awk script. Awk is still useful on *nix - various things like build recipes may use it in scripts - but for most purposes, perl has replaced it. (I consider that a pity. Awk is smaller and faster, and perl may be overkill for a lot of what you might need to do. Former Busybox maintainer Rob Landley griped elsewhere about sending patches to remove the dependency on Perl from Linux kernel builds, since awk did all that was needed, only to find it reappear again.) ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
