GAWK: Effective AWK Programming

Appendix A: The Evolution of the awk Language 263• The use of GNU Automake to help in standardizing the configuration process (seeSection B.2.1 [Compiling gawk for Unix], page 268).• The use of GNU gettext for gawk’s own message output (see Section 9.6 [gawk CanSpeak Your Language], page 167).• BeOS support (see Section B.4.2 [Installing gawk on BeOS], page 279).• Tandem support (see Section B.4.3 [Installing gawk on a Tandem], page 279).• The Atari port became officially unsupported (see Section B.4.1 [Installing gawk on theAtari ST], page 277).• The source code now uses new-style function definitions.• The ‘--disable-lint’ configuration option to disable lint checking at compile time(see Section B.2.2 [Additional Configuration Options], page 269).• The ‘--with-whiny-user-strftime’ configuration option to force the use of the includedversion of the strftime function for deficient systems (see Section B.2.2 [AdditionalConfiguration Options], page 269).• POSIX compliance for sub and gsub (see Section 8.1.3.1 [More About ‘\’ and ‘&’ withsub, gsub, and gensub], page 140).• The ‘--exec’ option, for use in CGI scripts (see Section 11.2 [Command-Line Options],page 177).• The length function was extended to accept an array argument and return the numberof elements in the array (see Section 8.1.3 [String-Manipulation Functions], page 132).• The strftime function acquired a third argument to enable printing times as UTC(see Section 8.1.5 [Using gawk’s Timestamp Functions], page 146).A.6 Major Contributors to gawkAlways give credit where credit is due.AnonymousThis section names the major contributors to gawk and/or this book, in approximatechronological order:• Dr. Alfred V. Aho, Dr. Peter J. Weinberger, and Dr. Brian W. Kernighan, all of BellLaboratories, designed and implemented Unix awk, from which gawk gets the majorityof its feature set.• Paul Rubin did the initial design and implementation in 1986, and wrote the first draft(around 40 pages) of this book.• Jay Fenlason finished the initial implementation.• Diane Close revised the first draft of this book, bringing it to around 90 pages.• Richard Stallman helped finish the implementation and the initial draft of this book.He is also the founder of the FSF and the GNU project.• John Woods contributed parts of the code (mostly fixes) in the initial version of gawk.• In 1988, David Trueman took over primary maintenance of gawk, making it compatiblewith “new” awk, and greatly improving its performance.• Pat Rankin provided the VMS port and its documentation.