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> that version of awk [...] didn't even have user-defined functions Also known as “old awk” or (retronymically) “oawk”. Heirloom still carries[1] what should b

> that version of awk [...] didn't even have user-defined functions Also known as “old awk” or (retronymically) “oawk”. Heirloom still carries[1] what should be a descendant of it (alongside the more familliar nawk). Also, > the executable is 46k thus still a bit larger than Turbo Pascal 3.02[2] :) That didn’t have a regex engine, admittedly. [1] https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/man/awk.1.html https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/man/awk.1.html [2] https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

coliveira 2y ago
Turbo Pascal was written in asm and highly optimized to reduce its size.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  in under 40 KB it had a lightning fast compiler that generated .COM files, and a text based IDE with a WordStar compatible code editor.
kragen 2y ago
the 39.7-kilobyte turbo pascal executable doesn't include the (modest) pascal runtime library, because it is itself written in assembly, not in pascal. awk, being an interpreter, does have to include the runtime library in the same executable as the parser. awk is also written in c rather than assembly, and moreover using lex and yacc; lex compiles the lexer into a deterministic automaton written in c for speed, and all of this is compiled with pcc, whose optimizations were relatively weak by today's standards i haven't compiled version 7 myself so i don't have a clear idea of how big it is a slight correction to my above comment! on running `file *` in bin/, i see, among other things at: PDP-11 pure executable awk: PDP-11 separate I&D executable bas: PDP-11 pure executable basename: PDP-11 pure executable bc: PDP-11 pure executable if i understand correctly, this means that this awk executable is built with what we used to call the 'small memory model' on the 8088, using separate instruction and data segments. that way, awk could have data stored at the same address as executable code, so you had 64 kibibytes available for just the data. you didn't have to squinch your awk program and all its data into the 65-46 = 19 kilobytes left over after the awk executable was loaded this, in effect, allows you 128 kilobytes for the functionality of your program: when you call an awk builtin function (usr/src/cmd/awk/proc.c lists seven named functions: substr, sindex, sprintf, printf, print, split, and instat) you're invoking code in the instruction segment, while the logic of your interpreted code shares the data segment with the data you're manipulating (strings or arrays or whatever) so it's at least misleading that i said it 'ran in the pdp-11's 64k address space' not all pdp-11s supported separate instruction and data segments (i think the more expensive pdp-11/45 did, but the pdp-11/40 and pdp-11/20 didn't) and most of the 7th edition executables didn't require that. but awk, adb, dcheck, dd, fgrep, icheck, lex, ncheck, refer, restor, sort, tar, tbl, uucp, uulog, uux, and yacc did. i'm not sure how you were supposed to run a unix system without dd, icheck, tar, uucp, restor, or adb (sdb and dbx didn't exist), so i think maybe at this point they had given up on supporting the smaller models

coliveira 2y ago

Turbo Pascal was written in asm and highly optimized to reduce its size.

fuzztester 2y ago
in under 40 KB it had a lightning fast compiler that generated .COM files, and a text based IDE with a WordStar compatible code editor.

kragen 2y ago

the 39.7-kilobyte turbo pascal executable doesn't include the (modest) pascal runtime library, because it is itself written in assembly, not in pascal. awk, being an interpreter, does have to include the runtime library in the same executable as the parser. awk is also written in c rather than assembly, and moreover using lex and yacc; lex compiles the lexer into a deterministic automaton written in c for speed, and all of this is compiled with pcc, whose optimizations were relatively weak by today's standards i haven't compiled version 7 myself so i don't have a clear idea of how big it is a slight correction to my above comment! on running `file *` in bin/, i see, among other things at: PDP-11 pure executable awk: PDP-11 separate I&D executable bas: PDP-11 pure executable basename: PDP-11 pure executable bc: PDP-11 pure executable if i understand correctly, this means that this awk executable is built with what we used to call the 'small memory model' on the 8088, using separate instruction and data segments. that way, awk could have data stored at the same address as executable code, so you had 64 kibibytes available for just the data. you didn't have to squinch your awk program and all its data into the 65-46 = 19 kilobytes left over after the awk executable was loaded this, in effect, allows you 128 kilobytes for the functionality of your program: when you call an awk builtin function (usr/src/cmd/awk/proc.c lists seven named functions: substr, sindex, sprintf, printf, print, split, and instat) you're invoking code in the instruction segment, while the logic of your interpreted code shares the data segment with the data you're manipulating (strings or arrays or whatever) so it's at least misleading that i said it 'ran in the pdp-11's 64k address space' not all pdp-11s supported separate instruction and data segments (i think the more expensive pdp-11/45 did, but the pdp-11/40 and pdp-11/20 didn't) and most of the 7th edition executables didn't require that. but awk, adb, dcheck, dd, fgrep, icheck, lex, ncheck, refer, restor, sort, tar, tbl, uucp, uulog, uux, and yacc did. i'm not sure how you were supposed to run a unix system without dd, icheck, tar, uucp, restor, or adb (sdb and dbx didn't exist), so i think maybe at this point they had given up on supporting the smaller models