[tannhaeuser]

Awk today is very much the same language it was in 1977 when it was introduced. Comparing your links with today's POSIX awk manpage doesn't yield a single thing Perl brought to awk. At best, while JavaScript syntax is even based on awk, you could say JavaScript regexpes are based on PCRE, and it wasn't clear whether use of capture groups/back references makes Perl regexpes accidentally Turing.

[kristopolous]

POSIX, right. POSIX sucks. POSIX anything is stuck 30 years ago. Nobody in 2023 really uses POSIX awk on some commercial UNIX like IBM AIX, they use GNU awk, that's the modern one I'm talking about https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/index.htm...

[kdmccormick]

Well, I look at the POSIX standards whenever I want to write shell scripts and Makefiles that work on both Linux and macOS. Which, in my current role, is often enough that I am driven crazy by how far POSIX is behind GNU tooling...

[kristopolous]

Yep. Funny enough, Linux is actually not POSIX certified

POSIX was initially a bunch of the Unix vendors getting together in the 80s seeing a rise of incompatibility saying "this shit is crazy let's find something we can agree on" and then the conflicts of trying to still have a differentiating But Also compatible product. They knew that if they cannibalized themselves, IBM Novell and DEC were there to snatch up the customers

As a result, POSIX was intentionally kneecapped by all the players but not enough to make it completely worthless.

By the 2010s I decided to simply ignore it and if something breaks on FreeBSD or whatever, make the decision then whether to support it or not. Mostly it's platform testing at the top and then subbing the gnu version of things and bailing out if it's not there.

[kdmccormick]

Got it. I'm the dev tools guy at my job right now, and we have a mix of Linux and Mac users, so I've gotta make sure that any shell I write works on both. For me, POSIX seems to be a good indicator of the intersection between the two OSs, even though the true intersection is neither a superset nor subset of POSIX (eg, Mac has bash, which isn't POSIX shell). Oh well. It's close enough to be useful, and I test it all manually anyway.

[tannhaeuser]

Mac OS ships zsh since 10.15 as default shell as I'm sure you know, with the (restricted ksh subset called) POSIX shell pretty much the intersection of what works on both Linux and Mac OS. There you have the usefulness of POSIX/SUS.

[tannhaeuser]

What are you talking about? There is no POSIX awk implementation, just a language spec and nawk AKA the one true awk. As shipped on Mac OS, whereas Debian ships mawk in addition to gawk. gawk is just much slower and unfortunately also buggy (crashes on a non-"C" locale with complex regexpes).

[kristopolous]

Right, "the one true awk" corresponds to a book written in 1988, very explicity. https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk

I was incorrect about 30 years. It's actually 35.

You were the one that that said POSIX awk to begin with, I was using your terms. I understand what you meant, why don't you?

As far as shitting on the GMU tools, I don't think I've seen someone do that in decades, especially just referencing the bottom of the man page like that.

As far as speed, I don't know how you're using these tools, but if gawk is your bottleneck and not i/o, there's probably smarter ways to do things.

This is not a productive conversation. You can live life however you want and if you're happy than I'm happy. We are definitely at an impasse. I'm off to bed.