david@cs.dal.ca (David Trueman) (06/24/91)
A new version of gawk (GNU AWK) is now available for anonymous FTP as
gawk-2.13.tar.Z on prep.ai.mit.edu.
Gawk-2.13 runs about twice as fast as 2.11.1 in general.
It is more robust, more portable and more carefully tested. A test
suite is now included. A very brief and incomplete list of changes appears
below -- do not be deceived: this is a major release (there will be no
diffs from gawk-2.11 released).
The current developers of Gawk (David Trueman and Arnold Robbins) would
like to thank and acknowledge the many people who have contributed to
the development through bug reports and fixes and suggestions.
Unfortunately, we have not been organized enough to keep track of all
the names -- for that we apologize.
Another group of people have assisted even more by porting Gawk to new
platforms and providing a great deal of feedback. They are (for
2.13):
Hal Peterson <hrp@pecan.cray.com> (Cray)
Pat Rankin <gawk.rankin@EQL.Caltech.Edu> (VMS)
Michal Jaegermann <NTOMCZAK@vm.ucs.UAlberta.CA> (Atari, NeXT, DEC 3100)
Mike Lijewski <mjlx@eagle.cnsf.cornell.edu> (IBM RS6000)
Last, but far from least, we would like to thank Brian Kernighan who
has helped to clear up many dark corners of the language and provided a
restraining touch when we have been overly tempted by "feeping
creaturism".
Support for MSC 5.1 under MS-DOS was supplied for 2.11 by Kent Williams
<williams@umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu>. It relies heavily on the earlier work
done for 2.10 by Conrad Kwok and Scott Garfinkle.
Summary of Changes from 2.11.1
------------------------------
Configuration is via a config file which is used by the "mkconf" script
to create Makefile and config.h. Sample configuration files for
various systems are included in the config directory.
New option "-W lint" to do extra checking. The coverage will expand a
bit in future releases.
Numeric to string conversion is done via the builtin variable CONVFMT
rather than OFMT, in conformance with the POSIX draft standard. It is
initialized with the same value as OFMT, so the vast majority of
programs should see no change in behaviour.
Awk program source no longer has any line length limits.
New builtin functions systime() and strftime() provided.
Error messages improved. (conformance with GNU standard in the next release)
FIELDWIDTHS variable gives a space-separated list of numbers specifying
the widths of input fields, to accomodate fixed-format input.
--
{uunet watmath}!dalcs!david or david@cs.dal.caoz@ursa.ccs.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) (06/28/91)
David Trueman writes:
A new version of gawk (GNU AWK) is now available for anonymous FTP as
gawk-2.13.tar.Z on prep.ai.mit.edu.
Thank you (and Robbins) for what I suspect is some great piece of work.
One question though: Does this distribution now contain a proper citation
for the Awk Book in its documentation as it should?
ozdavid@cs.dal.ca (David Trueman) (06/28/91)
In article <OZ.91Jun27150811@ursa.ccs.yorku.ca> oz@ursa.ccs.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes: > >David Trueman writes: > > A new version of gawk (GNU AWK) is now available for anonymous FTP as > gawk-2.13.tar.Z on prep.ai.mit.edu. > >Thank you (and Robbins) for what I suspect is some great piece of work. >One question though: Does this distribution now contain a proper citation >for the Awk Book in its documentation as it should? I hope that we can avoid hashing this out in this forum again, but since the question is asked: there is an explicit acknowledgment of Brian Kernighan's help in the ACKNOWLEDGMENT file and another acknowledgment in the README file for the code from the book in the test suite. The texinfo file has not yet been revised, but the official FSF policy has not changed, so far as I know. The important thing, as far as I am concerned, is that Brian Kernighan knows how Arnold and I feel. -- {uunet watmath}!dalcs!david or david@cs.dal.ca