A year after the release of GNU Awk version 4.2.1, version 5.0.0 was launched.
In the new version:
- Support for printf formats %a and %A from POSIX has been added.
- The testing infrastructure has been improved. The contents of test/Makefile.am have been simplified, and pc/Makefile.tst can now be generated from test/Makefile.in.
- Regex procedures have been replaced with procedures from GNULIB.
- The infrastructure has been updated: Bison 3.3, Automake 1.16.1, Gettext 0.19.8.1, makeinfo 6.5.
- Undocumented configuration options and corresponding code that allowed the use of non-Latin letters in identifiers have been removed.
- The configuration option "--with-whiny-user-strftime" has been removed.
- The code now makes stricter assumptions about the C99 environment.
- PROCINFO["platform"] now outputs the platform for which GNU Awk was built.
- Writing elements that are not variable names into SYMTAB now results in a fatal error. This is a change in behavior.
- Comment processing in the pretty-printer has been almost completely rewritten from scratch, resulting in fewer lost comments.
- Namespaces have been introduced. You can no longer do this: gawk -e 'BEGIN {' -e 'print "hello" }'.
- GNU Awk now considers the locale when ignoring case in single-byte locales instead of the hardcoded Latin-1 variant.
- A lot of bugs have been fixed.
Source: linux.org.ru
