Compatibility: so it can run all the existing AWK scripts without modification, and people can refer to existing AWK documentation when writing scripts, and the

Compatibility: so it can run all the existing AWK scripts without modification, and people can refer to existing AWK documentation when writing scripts, and they'll just work under GoAWK. For a 45-year old language, it's actually surprisingly good. There are a few annoyances and clumsy things (getting substrings is a function call without nice str[start:end] syntax, regex matches are harder than they need to be, string concatenation syntax is weird, arrays aren't nestable (except in Gawk), and so on). I've actually thought it'd be great to "fix" these things and make a nicer AWK language, but the problem is then no one would use it. :-)