🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3nlngt$981@mudraker.mtholyoke.edu>,
Jurgen Botz <jbotz@mtholyoke.edu> wrote:
>In article <3nk1f4$8ld@ionews.io.org>,
>Christopher B. Browne <cbbrown@io.org> wrote:
>>Certainly gawk is cheaper than Perl, but if you add associative
>>arrays, [...]
>
>My understanding of awk (which is minimal, I use Perl) is that it has
>alway had associative arrays.

I've been getting corrected repeatedly by email; I was perhaps not
sufficiently precise about this.

Yes, awk and gawk and nawk and mawk have associative arrays.  awk
had them before Perl was a glimmer in Larry Wall's eye, no doubt.

What I *meant* to say was "DBM files," which happen to be a way of
binding associative arrays to external files.  This is one area
where Perl definitely beats awk (although I wouldn't mind having
an alternative implementation that uses something like splay
trees instead of hash tables, thus providing the ordering
property that is often useful), and an example of something mentioned 
as a desired feature of "super-duper-gawk."

Adding dbm file support would obviously add an additional library
to those used in gawk, and correspondingly increases the size
and weight of gawk.

Imprecision on Usenet.  A dangerous thing.
-- 
Christopher Browne - cbbrown@io.org
Microsoft Office - What you use when you don't have access to good software.