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It's not entirely clear, but I believe that some of these changes, namely namespacing, may impact compatibility with POSIX awk[1] (as shipped on BSD, macOS, etc
by charlesdaniels 8y ago
It's not entirely clear, but I believe that some of these changes, namely namespacing, may impact compatibility with POSIX awk[1] (as shipped on BSD, macOS, etc. al.). Historically, GNU awk has been a strict superset of "standard" awk. I for one am concerned that this may impact portability of awk based scripts between platforms using gawk and other implementations.
It could be that I have missed a detail and this isn't really the case; I also certainly don't want to discourage progress, but there is something to be said for being able to write an awk program once and be confident it will work on any POSIX-ish system, rather than only those with a GNU userland.
1 - http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018edition/ http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018edition/