> Yet again, this whole story just makes me wonder why AWK has never > evolved to be more powerful language for this kind of purpose (Perl is > not the direction I am talking about). Certainly, simplicity of AWK > is valued. However, it does not mean that it should have just stopped > evolving at some point in history. > > Even if its functions use 1-origin for arrays, the language itself is > much more natural for the C programmers and the UNIX world. Personally, > I would love to see more advanced AWK with just-in-time compilation..
Indeed, we started with Lua because AWK was not embeddable and because of the 1-origin issue. (Also, because Lua supports closures; closures are really a very economical way of expressing certain kinds of operations.) But we had 10 years or so of using AWK, wrapped by sh, as a cross UNIX platform. Unfortunately, it didn't work well for Windows in those days. And sh scripts still don't, Cygwin notwithstanding. But for many things we still use AWK. --Terry