gawk: History summary
A.10 Summary
============
* The 'awk' language has evolved over time. The first release was
with V7 Unix, circa 1978. In 1987, for System V Release 3.1, major
additions, including user-defined functions, were made to the
language. Additional changes were made for System V Release 4, in
1989. Since then, further minor changes have happened under the
auspices of the POSIX standard.
* Brian Kernighan's 'awk' provides a small number of extensions that
are implemented in common with other versions of 'awk'.
* 'gawk' provides a large number of extensions over POSIX 'awk'.
They can be disabled with either the '--traditional' or '--posix'
options.
* The interaction of POSIX locales and regexp matching in 'gawk' has
been confusing over the years. Today, 'gawk' implements Rational
Range Interpretation, where ranges of the form '[a-z]' match _only_
the characters numerically between 'a' through 'z' in the machine's
native character set. Usually this is ASCII, but it can be EBCDIC
on IBM S/390 systems.
* Many people have contributed to 'gawk' development over the years.
We hope that the list provided in this major node is complete and
gives the appropriate credit where credit is due.
Info Catalog
gawk: Contributors
gawk: Language History