gawk: Manual History

1 
1 The GNU Project and This Book
1 =============================
1 
1 The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit organization dedicated
1 to the production and distribution of freely distributable software.  It
1 was founded by Richard M. Stallman, the author of the original Emacs
1 editor.  GNU Emacs is the most widely used version of Emacs today.
1 
1    The GNU(1) Project is an ongoing effort on the part of the Free
1 Software Foundation to create a complete, freely distributable,
1 POSIX-compliant computing environment.  The FSF uses the GNU General
1 Public License (GPL) to ensure that its software's source code is always
1 available to the end user.  A copy of the GPL is included for your
1 reference (⇒Copying).  The GPL applies to the C language source
1 code for 'gawk'.  To find out more about the FSF and the GNU Project
1 online, see the GNU Project's home page (https://www.gnu.org).  This
1 Info file may also be read from GNU's website
1 (https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/).
1 
1    A shell, an editor (Emacs), highly portable optimizing C, C++, and
1 Objective-C compilers, a symbolic debugger and dozens of large and small
1 utilities (such as 'gawk'), have all been completed and are freely
1 available.  The GNU operating system kernel (the HURD), has been
1 released but remains in an early stage of development.
1 
1    Until the GNU operating system is more fully developed, you should
1 consider using GNU/Linux, a freely distributable, Unix-like operating
1 system for Intel, Power Architecture, Sun SPARC, IBM S/390, and other
1 systems.(2)  Many GNU/Linux distributions are available for download
1 from the Internet.
1 
1    The Info file itself has gone through multiple previous editions.
1 Paul Rubin wrote the very first draft of 'The GAWK Manual'; it was
1 around 40 pages long.  Diane Close and Richard Stallman improved it,
1 yielding a version that was around 90 pages and barely described the
1 original, "old" version of 'awk'.
1 
1    I started working with that version in the fall of 1988.  As work on
1 it progressed, the FSF published several preliminary versions (numbered
1 0.X).  In 1996, edition 1.0 was released with 'gawk' 3.0.0.  The FSF
1 published the first two editions under the title 'The GNU Awk User's
1 Guide'.
1 
1    This edition maintains the basic structure of the previous editions.
1 For FSF edition 4.0, the content was thoroughly reviewed and updated.
1 All references to 'gawk' versions prior to 4.0 were removed.  Of
1 significant note for that edition was the addition of ⇒Debugger.
1 
1    For FSF edition 4.2, the content has been reorganized into parts, and
1 the major new additions are ⇒Arbitrary Precision Arithmetic, and
1 ⇒Dynamic Extensions.
1 
1    This Info file will undoubtedly continue to evolve.  If you find an
1 error in the Info file, please report it!  ⇒Bugs for information
1 on submitting problem reports electronically.
1 
1    ---------- Footnotes ----------
1 
1    (1) GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix."
1 
1    (2) The terminology "GNU/Linux" is explained in the ⇒Glossary.
1