In message <199812102056.PAA18416@jfwhome.funhouse.com>, "John F. Woods" writes
:
>> I *think* mawk is less restricted; 

>I was mistaken.  mawk is GPLed.  nawk, however, has a BSD-like copyright and
>is, of course, from The Master.

For historical reasons, mawk is under GPL because he got a lot of help from
the author of gawk.

That said, I wish we'd use it; I've seen some benchmarks, and mawk is *very*
nice.  About two years ago, it failed two tests in the gawk regression suite,
and I seem to recall that one was fixed in his unreleased tree, and the other
was a matter of dispute.  :)

Still, it's a very nice awk implementation, and I'd be happy to see it
integrated.  It's no *worse* for licensing, and it's a much nicer awk.  It
will also probably have a smaller degree of exponential growth over
time than GNU software.  ;-)

-s