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> Is there a particular benefit in writing a VM in AWK Not really. Later on the book just ran out of line-matching examples to go through and started doing reg
by siraben 3y ago
> Is there a particular benefit in writing a VM in AWK
Not really. Later on the book just ran out of line-matching examples to go through and started doing regular programming instead :P. When I actually write AWK code I rely on line-matching and using a variable to handle state.
- pdw 3y agoAt the time, awk was the only scripting language (other than shell) generally available on Unix systems. Perl, Tcl, Python didn't exist yet. So awk was often used for general-purpose programming.