On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 08:22:32PM -0600, Rob Landley wrote:
> On 12/29/2014 04:58 PM, stephen Turner wrote:
> > Also about your todo list, i heard that mawk was fastest among awks but
> > sadly its gpl2 so not sure if you could preserve the code/structure that
> > makes it fast but i'm hoping.
> 
> If its GPL I don't actually plan to _read_ its code. (We're not quite to
> the "SCO contamination theory" level of frivolous GPL enforcement suits,
> but give it 5-10 years...)

I've read that mawk uses a JIT.
It also has fixed limits, unlike gawk.

The current maintainer is Thomas Dickey, maintainer of xterm, byacc,
dialog, and at least a half-dozen other things. He relicensed dialog
from GPL to LGPL after finding that he replaced all the code except
the function declarations and brackets, so I don't think he's in favor
of that view.

> > I don't know awk..... guess i'm buying a book.
> 
> There's a posix spec, a PDF of the original AWK book is online at
> http://books.cat-v.org/computer-science/awk-programming-language/The_AWK_Programming_Language.pdf

The "One True AWK" (the latest iteration of the implementation that goes 
with the book) is under a BSD-ish license, (c) Lucent.
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/btl.mirror/

And OpenBSD uses a patched version of it, which can be found on the 
usual dozen+ mirrors (under src/usr.bin/awk).

Locally, I generally use github.com/iguleder/lok, which is OpenBSD awk
ported to Linux.

HTH,
Isaac Dunham
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