The State of the AWK

Re:The State of the AWK by vintnes on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @07:10AM (#23245493)

Namespaces are an interesting addition, and I appreciate GNU trying to modernize such a ubiquitous tool, but I wish they would put more effort into expanding the built-in utilities. There's still no `join`, for example. No high-level date mechanics. Also, no Oniguruma! I'm tired of looping over `match` and `sub` statements because you can't specify non-greedy regex.

The @include and @load directives are extremely useful for shipping your own customizations, but I prefer the maintenance priorities of the JQ maintainers [1], who understand that powerful builtins are what burn into user's minds, making a tool mentally indispensable.

1. https://github.com/stedolan/jq

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Re:The State of the AWK by tyingq on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @08:53AM (#23246272)

It is fairly straightforward to extend gawk since they added the gawkextlib functionality to regular gawk (vs xgawk).

Here's the readfile extension, for example: https://github.com/gvlx/gawk/blob/master/extension/readfile....

But, you're right...there aren't many extensions, and little activity around adding new ones.

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