3 ms·

Almost relevant: I wrote a parser generator in and for awk (called 'yawk' even though it did LL(1) instead of LR grammars), even older than this. But at some po

Almost relevant: I wrote a parser generator in and for awk (called 'yawk' even though it did LL(1) instead of LR grammars), even older than this. But at some point I lost it, and it was never released online.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Which do you think would be better in terms of coming with all major distros and easiest to write compiler in: awk or bash? Ive forgotten both due to injury so cant tell without lots of experimenting.
- abecedarius 10y ago
  I've never done any serious programming with bash, just simple Bourne shell scripts, because I don't want to think about all the escaping rules and such. I did write some programs in Awk in the 90s (notably https://github.com/darius/awklisp https://github.com/darius/awklisp), so I'd go with that. Maybe someone who's bent bash to their will could speak up here? AFAIK they're both ubiquitous, though you might need a particular awk like gawk for library functions, depending on what you need to do. Nowadays I'm way more likely to use Python, though of course it's a much bigger dependency. Sorry about the injury, and good luck -- I'd like to hear how it goes.
  - anonymous_fun 10y ago
    The escaping in Bash can be a pain. I was recently writing an execution wrapper in Bash, and needed to send the results via JSON. Fighting with the quotes was almost enough to make me throw in the towel and move to a language with a builtin JSON parser, but I ran across this technique, of embedding a heredoc to preserve quotes in a variable. https://gist.github.com/kdabir/9c086970e0b1a53c3df491b20fcb0839 https://gist.github.com/kdabir/9c086970e0b1a53c3df491b20fcb0... It 'simplified' things and kept them readable. Thanks for sharing awklisp. Nice reading for a Sunday morning.
    - abecedarius 10y ago
      I'm glad you enjoyed that, thanks. :)

3 ms·

Almost relevant: I wrote a parser generator in and for awk (called 'yawk' even though it did LL(1) instead of LR grammars), even older than this. But at some po

by abecedarius 10y ago

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Which do you think would be better in terms of coming with all major distros and easiest to write compiler in: awk or bash? Ive forgotten both due to injury so cant tell without lots of experimenting.
- abecedarius 10y ago
  I've never done any serious programming with bash, just simple Bourne shell scripts, because I don't want to think about all the escaping rules and such. I did write some programs in Awk in the 90s (notably https://github.com/darius/awklisp https://github.com/darius/awklisp), so I'd go with that. Maybe someone who's bent bash to their will could speak up here? AFAIK they're both ubiquitous, though you might need a particular awk like gawk for library functions, depending on what you need to do. Nowadays I'm way more likely to use Python, though of course it's a much bigger dependency. Sorry about the injury, and good luck -- I'd like to hear how it goes.
  - anonymous_fun 10y ago
    The escaping in Bash can be a pain. I was recently writing an execution wrapper in Bash, and needed to send the results via JSON. Fighting with the quotes was almost enough to make me throw in the towel and move to a language with a builtin JSON parser, but I ran across this technique, of embedding a heredoc to preserve quotes in a variable. https://gist.github.com/kdabir/9c086970e0b1a53c3df491b20fcb0839 https://gist.github.com/kdabir/9c086970e0b1a53c3df491b20fcb0... It 'simplified' things and kept them readable. Thanks for sharing awklisp. Nice reading for a Sunday morning.
    - abecedarius 10y ago
      I'm glad you enjoyed that, thanks. :)