4 ms·
The issue was that none of the trio of shell scripts/awk/sed could stand alone, so the "language" by necessity consisted of all three tools. You'd write the mai
by tod222 13y ago
The issue was that none of the trio of shell scripts/awk/sed could stand alone, so the "language" by necessity consisted of all three tools. You'd write the main loop in shell and use awk and sed when required.
Remember, this was 1987—25 years ago, before bash and other modern shells, and with much more primitive versions of awk and sed. Nor was the web available to look things up.
Writing shell/awk/sed scripts back then was awful, no matter how much the Bell Labs folks touted its superiority.
When perl showed up on comp.sources.unix it was an incredible breath of fresh air. I downloaded and built perl based on its claim to replace shell script/awk/sed programming and Larry Wall's reputation as the author of rn [1], my preferred newsreader for usenet. Perl lived up to its billing and was an enormous improvement for writing scripts.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rn_%28newsreader%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rn_%28newsreader%29
- snogglethorpe 13y agoHmm, I used awk in 1987, and it was just fine... it really hasn't changed all that much since. "nawk" ("new awk") vs. "awk" was an issue, with the former being preferable (I don't recall why offhand, other than it seemed a lot less buggy), but even that dated from the mid-'80s. Perl certainly offered new functionality, but it felt palpably kludgier than awk. The idea that it was some sort of giant advance over awk was rather overplayed, especially within awk's domain, where awk's cleaner language design and more focused features were real advantages over perl. [When perl first showed up, I remember thinking how churlish its "a2p" script was... who'd want to switch to perl, given a working awk program?!]