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Why do you find it odd? I find it to be the very best introduction to C-style control structures. Chapter 2 of The AWK Programming Language has incredible bene

• jolmg 7y ago
  They probably refer to how it has the top-level as <line-condition> { <code> } That's unusual enough among programming languages to call it odd. Being able to do stuff like if (/some-pattern/) { ... and have the regex be evaluated like a condition where it matches with the current line implicitly is also pretty unique.
  • funkymike 7y ago
    if (/some-pattern/) { ... This isn't really unique when you consider perl. while (<>) { if (/pattern/) { This does the same. Awk simply has the implicit loop.
    • jolmg 7y ago
      Yes, I think Perl based that on Awk, but then those are the only 2 languages I know that support something like that. That's still very unique. On the implicit loop, along with Ruby, they're the only 3 languages I know that support something like that. That's also pretty unique, and Awk is the only one that has the implicit loop as a requirement.
      • naniwaduni 7y ago
        The implicit loop is uncommon among general-purpose langauges, but very common among filtering-centric languages like awk and grep and sed. For a more recent example, see jq. perl 5 may be close to the only mainstream general-purpose language to have embraced that paradigm though.