gawk: History summary

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1 A.10 Summary
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1    * The 'awk' language has evolved over time.  The first release was
1      with V7 Unix, circa 1978.  In 1987, for System V Release 3.1, major
1      additions, including user-defined functions, were made to the
1      language.  Additional changes were made for System V Release 4, in
1      1989.  Since then, further minor changes have happened under the
1      auspices of the POSIX standard.
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1    * Brian Kernighan's 'awk' provides a small number of extensions that
1      are implemented in common with other versions of 'awk'.
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1    * 'gawk' provides a large number of extensions over POSIX 'awk'.
1      They can be disabled with either the '--traditional' or '--posix'
1      options.
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1    * The interaction of POSIX locales and regexp matching in 'gawk' has
1      been confusing over the years.  Today, 'gawk' implements Rational
1      Range Interpretation, where ranges of the form '[a-z]' match _only_
1      the characters numerically between 'a' through 'z' in the machine's
1      native character set.  Usually this is ASCII, but it can be EBCDIC
1      on IBM S/390 systems.
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1    * Many people have contributed to 'gawk' development over the years.
1      We hope that the list provided in this major node is complete and
1      gives the appropriate credit where credit is due.
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