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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