[TUHS] Re: The AWK Programming Language, 2nd Ed.: What's new?

Hi. markus schnalke <meillo(a)marmaro.de> wrote: Inside information? As it happens, yes, I do have some. :-) (I was a reviewer.) [In the below, "awk" means Brian Kernighan's awk.] In the 36 (!) years since the first edition was published, awk has undergone, shall we say, a large number of small changes. These are listed in the FIXES file currently in the master branch of https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk. In addition, Brian Kernighan decided to add support for UTF-8 input, which is what awk now expects, and support for CSV input files when invoked with the --csv option. Furthermore, there is a new \u escape sequence which must be followed by 1-8 hexadecimal digits for specifying Unicode code points. The book itself has been carefully revised. The large second chapter which was a reference to the full language was moved to an appendix. Many of the example programs from the first edition were retained and updated, but there is also quite of lot of pleasing new material. There is mention of, and occasional comparison with, gawk, mawk and Ben Hoyt's GoAwk, but by and large the focus is on the authors' version. The new code is currently in the "csv" branch of the above Github repo. The maintainer is in the process of tidying up the repo (dealing with issues and pull requests) and will merge the csv branch into master sometime in the very near future. I'm told that the printed books with get to the publisher's warehouse towards the end of September. The book is available now on O'Reilly's Safari learning site (safari.oreilly.com) for anyone who has a subscription. Matching code (--csv and \u) are in gawk's master branch now. I will make a release this fall, after the new code has moved into master in BWK's awk. I heartily recommend the book; it is totally up to Brian Kernighan's usual very high standard. Enjoy, Arnold