An old friend of a professor who was looking for a little time for himself in the summer received an email from him. After Brian asked how their US visit was going, he dropped off hundreds of lines of code that he helped create for AWK, the text-parsing tool he helped create at Bell Labs.
The email was posted in late May as a kind of pseudo-commit on the onetrueawk repo by long time maintainer Arnold Robbins. I don't know how. I will attempt to submit a request. Even though you helped, I still don't have a proper understanding, so this may take a while.
The "K" in AWK is a special purpose language that was used to extract and manipulate language that was key to interoperability between systems. A working awk function is important for both the Standard UNIX Specification and theIEEE POSIX certification. "One True AWK," also known as nawk, is a version of the awk based on the 1985 book The AWK Programming Language.
The K in "K&R C" is the co-author of the seminal 1978 book The C Programming Language. C's roots are a lot deeper. The creator of C was persuaded by Kernighan to collaborate on a book to spread the knowledge. The structure underpinning every modern programming language can be traced back to that book.
AdvertisementThe "Hello, world" code example was first shown by Kernighan. He talked to Richard Jensen about the history of Unix.
The onetrueawk repository is relatively quiet, with 21 contributors, 46 users watching and commits coming every few months. According to The Register, Kernighan's fix came to light because it was mentioned in an interview with the professor.
"It's always been an embarrassment that AWK only works with 8-bit inputs, but it doesn't really handle Unicode at all," Kernighan says. I worked with an incredibly old program a few months ago. You can have regular expressions that pick up Japanese characters, things like that, if you have it at this point.
Kernighan mentioned in the interview that he has patched something to allow AWK to handle CSV files.
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