I am considering replacing mawk/awk with something else. Mawk was only added because I needed something that could do what 'expr' does, and it made more sense to add all of mawk which is about the same size (!). I then started to implement various other stuff in awk like split and cut and so forth. But, mawk doesn't allow nulls. Which I have always been fed up with, but havn't found a better general purpose language to have in its place. Now, I have started looking at the issue again, and some alternatives have come to light. One in particular, at www.lua.org, is "lua", which I can make a 76K interpreter (10K smaller than mawk) which is a real language. Drawbacks include that nobody knows it, it will be harder to include documentation than with the excellent mawk man pages, and probably it doesn't do as much automatically as mawk. But the plus side is that then I or a user on the fly could do much much more... ok, I admit I would be happier with an interpreted C, or Perl, or Gawk, or, even a JVM, but, none of those things seem to be practical, and Lua has all KINDS of stuff that is more power than I would expect in 76K... Let me know what you think of the idea. -Tom
