RE: Lua in-kernel (lbuf library)

["Terry Moore" <tmm%mcci.com@localhost>]

> Yet again, this whole story just makes me wonder why AWK has never
> evolved to be more powerful language for this kind of purpose (Perl is
> not the direction I am talking about).  Certainly, simplicity of AWK
> is valued.  However, it does not mean that it should have just stopped
> evolving at some point in history.
> 
> Even if its functions use 1-origin for arrays, the language itself is
> much more natural for the C programmers and the UNIX world.  Personally,
> I would love to see more advanced AWK with just-in-time compilation..

Indeed, we started with Lua because AWK was not embeddable and because of
the 1-origin issue. (Also, because Lua supports closures; closures are
really a very economical way of expressing certain kinds of operations.) But
we had 10 years or so of using AWK, wrapped by sh, as a cross UNIX platform.
Unfortunately, it didn't work well for Windows in those days.  And sh
scripts still don't, Cygwin notwithstanding.

But for many things we still use AWK.

--Terry