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This 45 year-old Unix software is lastly getting an improve

AWK, a software program platform first launched in 1977, has lastly obtained a long-awaited replace virtually half a century after its inception.

What makes the launch extra spectacular is that it’s the work of 80-year-old Canadian pc scientist Brian Kernighan, a part of the crew behind the software program’s acronym itself (AWK – Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan).

POSIX compliance in working system phrases requires that it consists of AWK, a programming language that’s destined to investigate textual content information. It first appeared in Model 7 UNIX in 1979, which is credited with being the final model of UNIX created by Bell Labs earlier than it was commercialized by AT&T. Different POSIX-certified OSs embody macOS, VxWorks, and z/OS.

AWK replace

In a GitHub entry Kernighan writes in regards to the replace entitles “Add BWK’s e mail”. He says:

“Lastly, with a little bit of spare time after the educational treadmill slows, I’ve gotten again to futzing round with Unicode in awk.”

He writes that he now has it “largely” working, “via a mixture of utilizing utf-8 internally for capabilities like size(), and conversion to utf-32 in common expressions.”

Discovered within the replace is one realloc bug, which leads Kernighan to suspect that they might be extra. A “truthful quantity” of testing has already been undertaken, however he writes that “clearly extra exams are wanted.”

Feedback within the thread spotlight the importance of the replace, and embody one-liners like “wow” and “respect”. 

The Register reviews that the code was really modified earlier in 2022, however was solely picked up by wider audiences because of a just lately launched interview with Kernighan.

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