A major new release of the GNU project's implementation of the AWK programming language, Gawk 5.0.0, has been introduced. AWK was developed in the 70s of the last century and has not undergone significant changes since the mid-80s, in which the main backbone of the language was defined, which made it possible to maintain the original stability and simplicity of the language over the past decades. Despite its advanced age, AWK is still actively used by administrators to perform routine work related to parsing various kinds of text files and generating simple resulting statistics.
Key changes:
- Implemented support for namespaces;
- Added support for the "%a" and "%A" format specifiers defined in the POSIX standard for the printf function;
- Subroutines for processing regular expressions have been replaced with analogues from Gnulib;
- Added PROCINFO["platform"] element with a string identifying the platform gawk is built for;
- Writing to SYMTAB elements that are not variable names now results in an error;
- The code for processing comments has been redesigned, problems with displaying comments in formatted output have been resolved.
Source: opennet.ru