The GNU
Awk manual has the topic incoherently spread across three chapters.
It would certainly be helpful to have a more coherent picture and a
guidance or suggestion (with all the caveats, e.g. about what happens
with a RS="^$" statement in other awks). There have also performance
issues been addressed by Arnold in the past, I think that the @load
option is the fastest because it bypasses the regexp processing,
which would aid the user to make an informed choice what to use when.
Until we have such a "directive" I fear we'll repeat our discussions
every couple years again, and they seem to not be quickly terminated discussions on every re-iteration. ;-)
On Mon, 12 Jul 2021 16:25:30 +0200
Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou@hotmail.com> wrote:
[On AWK dark corners.]
The GNU
Awk manual has the topic incoherently spread across three chapters.
It would certainly be helpful to have a more coherent picture and a
guidance or suggestion (with all the caveats, e.g. about what happens
with a RS="^$" statement in other awks). There have also performance
issues been addressed by Arnold in the past, I think that the @load
option is the fastest because it bypasses the regexp processing,
which would aid the user to make an informed choice what to use when.
Until we have such a "directive" I fear we'll repeat our discussions
every couple years again, and they seem to not be quickly terminated
discussions on every re-iteration. ;-)
The only person who can provide authoritative answers is Arnold Robbins. I think he reads comp.lang.awk but I'm not sure if he reads comp.unix.shell so you should have crossposted to comp.lang.awk (which I've done). As I'm typing this , I can see that several more posts have been made in the thread discussing esoteric issues regarding AWK .It would have served everyone best if these also appeared on comp.lang.awk .
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