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The Awk Programming Language

awk.dev

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Re: The Awk Programming Language

#2

Post by binary_ninja »

Awk has always been a language that I loved but I have struggled to use besides quick jobs for parsing text files. I understand it is meant to be use for exactly that, but the fact that is simple, fast and lightweight sometimes makes me want to do something more with it, but when I start trying to do something besides parsing text I find that it starts becoming awkward (pun intented?).

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#3

Post by usrbinbash »

binary_ninja wrote: post #2

Awk has always been a language that I loved but I have struggled to use besides quick jobs for parsing text files. I understand it is meant to be use for exactly that, but the fact that is simple, fast and lightweight sometimes makes me want to do something more with it, but when I start trying to do something besides parsing text I find that it starts becoming awkward (pun intented?).

> but the fact that is simple, fast and lightweight

I see awk as a DSL to be honest. Yes, it can be used as a general purpose language, but that quickly becomes, as you say, awkward :D

Like many DSLs, it is simple, fast and lightweight as long as it is used for it's intended purpose. Once you start using it for something else, these advantages evaporate pretty quickly, because then you have to essentially work around the DSL design to get it to do what you want.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#6

Post by bluetomcat »

binary_ninja wrote: post #2

Awk has always been a language that I loved but I have struggled to use besides quick jobs for parsing text files. I understand it is meant to be use for exactly that, but the fact that is simple, fast and lightweight sometimes makes me want to do something more with it, but when I start trying to do something besides parsing text I find that it starts becoming awkward (pun intented?).

It's a language for creating quick alternative views from line- and column-oriented text streams. That means, take the output of another tool and represent it in a different way.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#7

Post by asicsp »

binary_ninja wrote: post #2

Awk has always been a language that I loved but I have struggled to use besides quick jobs for parsing text files. I understand it is meant to be use for exactly that, but the fact that is simple, fast and lightweight sometimes makes me want to do something more with it, but when I start trying to do something besides parsing text I find that it starts becoming awkward (pun intented?).

I use awk mostly for one-liners and resort to Python when I need more than a few lines of code.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#10

Post by siraben »

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...

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