* Karl Berry wrote on Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 12:14:28AM CET: > > But for purposes of explaining to rms, can someone tell me (as briefly > as possible :) why it is desirable to switch to awk instead of sticking > with sed? > > (I can imagine some reasons, but best to ask, I figure.)
The primary reason for introducing it to Autoconf was, that it allows a faster substitution of variables. Roughly speaking, a sed script like s/@var1@/text1/g s/@var2@/text2/g ... used on an input file of the form [EMAIL PROTECTED]@ [EMAIL PROTECTED]@ ... has an overhead scaling quadratically in the number of variables. The original proposal has more details and measurements: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf-patches/2006-11/msg00035.html FWIW, I am working on a larger change to the list of makefile and installation utilities in standards.texi. If you want to wait, I can try to finish it this weekend. Cheers, Ralf
