[hacknews] awk goes double-precision

henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (07/07/84)

Awk(1) has been altered to use double-precision arithmetic throughout.
This greatly increases arithmetic precision at the cost of a substantial
space penalty for programs with big awk data structures.  Such programs
are thought to be uncommon, and the tradeoff is worth it in general.
The old single-precision awk has been retained just in case, under the
name "spawk".  [Don't complain about the name, we thought about calling
it "fawk".]
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry