Two alternative perspectives
on GNU Awk
(both from 1996):
- "Ve
are using ze GNU AWK"
by Philip
Greenspun:
-
"Relational databases and the World Wide Web: Automatic
generation of hypertext based on reverse-engineered meta
information." That sounded like it would be the best talk
in the conference. I settled into my plastic chair in the
plastic Holiday Inn conference room with high hopes. A
young Austrian began to page through some Viewgraphs. "Ve
are dumping ze database catalog tables out of ze Oracle
system into Microsoft Access. Un dan, ve are using an AWK
script to generate ze static files. Ze big challenge is
making ze 6 character file names for some operating
systems as can't have ze long file names."
A man raised his hand. I figured he was going to say
"Why didn't you install Oracle WebServer and then get a
10-year-old to write three PL/SQL functions to extract the
data from the RDBMS on the fly?" but instead he asked "Why
did you use AWK instead of perl?"
The Austrian responded "AWK is the only language that I
know."
- Why
GAWK for AI?
[.txt
version] by
Ronald P. Loui:
Most people are surprised when I tell them
what language we use in our undergraduate AI programming
class. That's understandable. We use GAWK. GAWK, Gnu's
version of Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan's old pattern
scanning language isn't even viewed as a programming
language by most people. Like PERL and TCL, most prefer
to view it as a "scripting language." It has no objects;
it is not functional; it does no built-in logic
programming. Their surprise turns to puzzlement when I
confide that (a) while the students are allowed to use
any language they want; (b) with a single exception, the
best work consistently results from those working in
GAWK. (footnote: The exception was a PASCAL programmer
who is now an NSF graduate fellow getting a Ph.D. in
mathematics at Harvard.) Programmers in C, C++,
and LISP haven't even been close (we have not
seen work in PROLOG or JAVA).
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