gawk: History

1 
1 History of 'awk' and 'gawk'
1 ===========================
1 
1                    Recipe for a Programming Language
1 
1           1 part 'egrep'   1 part 'snobol'
1           2 parts 'ed'     3 parts C
1 
1    Blend all parts well using 'lex' and 'yacc'.  Document minimally and
1 release.
1 
1    After eight years, add another part 'egrep' and two more parts C.
1 Document very well and release.
1 
1    The name 'awk' comes from the initials of its designers: Alfred V.
1 Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian W. Kernighan.  The original version
1 of 'awk' was written in 1977 at AT&T Bell Laboratories.  In 1985, a new
1 version made the programming language more powerful, introducing
1 user-defined functions, multiple input streams, and computed regular
1 expressions.  This new version became widely available with Unix System
1 V Release 3.1 (1987).  The version in System V Release 4 (1989) added
1 some new features and cleaned up the behavior in some of the "dark
1 corners" of the language.  The specification for 'awk' in the POSIX
1 Command Language and Utilities standard further clarified the language.
1 Both the 'gawk' designers and the original 'awk' designers at Bell
1 Laboratories provided feedback for the POSIX specification.
1 
1    Paul Rubin wrote 'gawk' in 1986.  Jay Fenlason completed it, with
1 advice from Richard Stallman.  John Woods contributed parts of the code
1 as well.  In 1988 and 1989, David Trueman, with help from me, thoroughly
1 reworked 'gawk' for compatibility with the newer 'awk'.  Circa 1994, I
1 became the primary maintainer.  Current development focuses on bug
1 fixes, performance improvements, standards compliance, and,
1 occasionally, new features.
1 
1    In May 1997, Ju"rgen Kahrs felt the need for network access from
1 'awk', and with a little help from me, set about adding features to do
1 this for 'gawk'.  At that time, he also wrote the bulk of 'TCP/IP
1 Internetworking with 'gawk'' (a separate document, available as part of
1 the 'gawk' distribution).  His code finally became part of the main
1 'gawk' distribution with 'gawk' version 3.1.
1 
1    John Haque rewrote the 'gawk' internals, in the process providing an
1 'awk'-level debugger.  This version became available as 'gawk' version
1 4.0 in 2011.
1 
1    ⇒Contributors for a full list of those who have made important
1 contributions to 'gawk'.
1