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What would you put forward as an alternative to awk for the kinds of complex projects the author describes? Sam and vi are both descendants of ed, but go in ve
by cturner 13y ago
What would you put forward as an alternative to awk for the kinds of complex projects the author describes?
Sam and vi are both descendants of ed, but go in very different directions. Is there a path forward from awk that focuses on different strengths to perl's choices? (perhaps avoiding perl's move to being multi-paradigm)
Is there something that sits close to unix in the way awk does, but which is stronger?
- silentbicycle 13y agoI use lua for that, and it seems to be a very good fit. There's awk influence in its history, so it's probably no accident.
- JulianMorrison 13y agoHadoop and friends.
- UNIXgod 13y agoRuby does awk for the most part. I can't comment on strength since awk has a small footprint compared to both ruby and perl clocking in just under 96k. Also both emacs and ed are descendants of TECO =) The editors have had major impact on our languages mainly because regular expressions, called regular sets at the time, where implemented in Thompson's ed which was based on an earlier line editor implementation called qed used on ctss and multics. One can follow the evolution almost in dialect fairly well. ed -> grep -> sed -> awk ed -> em -> ex -> vi awk -> perl -> ruby so ed -> grep -> sed -> awk -> perl -> ruby The right tool for the right job when all you know is a chainsaw everything looks like a hammer unix process are cheap and all that yada yada philosophical paradigmy finite state automata pipelines vs pointers vs classes vs recursive enumeration iterative parenthesis backtick mind expansions expression logic =P
- smalltalk 13y agoed is not a descendant of TECO. http://web.mit.edu/kolya/misc/txt/editors http://web.mit.edu/kolya/misc/txt/editors
- smalltalk 13y agoIs this factually incorrect? If so, please cite the source that contradicts the common knowledge that ed descended from QED, developed entirely separate from the MIT environment that led to EMACS. Which explains why EMACS couldn't be less like a good UNIX program.