AWK, a software program platform first launched in 1977, has lastly acquired 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 recordsdata. 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 (opens in new tab), Kernighan writes concerning the replace entitles “Add BWK’s electronic mail”. He says:

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

He writes that he now has it “largely” working, “by way of a mixture of utilizing utf-Eight 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 could be extra. A “truthful quantity” of testing has already been undertaken, however he writes that “clearly extra checks are wanted.”

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

The Register (opens in new tab) experiences 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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