[TUHS] Nice video with Brian Kernighan

Rich Morin rdm at cfcl.com
Sun Aug 21 04:24:57 AEST 2022


After watching the video, I remain curious about a couple of things.

Q: What were Brian's main contributions to AWK? (aside from the book :-)

Q: Where did the idea for AWK originate?

FWIW, my spouse (Vicki Brown) used AWK to support her Master's thesis.  She:

- defined a common, human-friendly data format
- used AWK to convert it for submission to IBM and Univac programs
- used AWK to boil down the output (printer plots of dendograms)
- used AWK to convert the data for use with my SunCore interpreter

This all worked very well, but some real pain was involved when her advisor asked her to convert her scripts to Fortran...

-r



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