Re: CVS commit: src/external/historical/nawk/bin

[Roland Illig <roland.illig%gmx.de@localhost>]

Am 05.07.2022 um 02:16 schrieb Valery Ushakov:
> Posix has the echo example as:
>
>    BEGIN  {
>            for (i = 1; i < ARGC; ++i)
>            printf("%s%s", ARGV[i], i==ARGC-1?"\n":" ")
>    }
>
> which I would still consider ugly :).  I would rather use instead:
>
>    BEGIN { for (i = 1; i < ARGC; ++i) $i = ARGV[i]; print }
>
> that, as a bonus, demonstrates $var field references (that the current
> man page doesn't mention at all) and the magic $0 "reassembly".

Now that looks clean and idiomatic.

> Anyway, I was wrong about POSIX - I somehow managed to screw up my
> search and missed the passage that specifies it:
>
>    If an awk program consists of only actions with the pattern BEGIN,
>    and the BEGIN action contains no getline function, awk shall exit
>    without reading its input when the last statement in the last BEGIN
>    action is executed. If an awk program consists of only actions with
>    the pattern END or only actions with the patterns BEGIN and END, the
>    input shall be read before the statements in the END actions are
>    executed.

Hmmm, strange that we both missed this part on the first reading, even
though it seems obvious now.  I remember having searched for BEGIN,
which would have led me to this paragraph, but I somehow skipped it when
trying to prove my point.

Roland