Gawk

[Richard Burns]

Hi,
I am beginning to tear out my hair over what _may_ be a gawk bug or
limit.

I have an (embarrasingly) very large awk program to maintain ( 3141
lines of code) and am getting
a parse error on function definitions as I try to move it into a gawk
context.
I have tried relocating the offending function body around in the source
and the result is the parse error message moves to another function
definition. I am beginning to think that there is some undocumented
upper limit
on the number of functions accepted  by the gawk interpreter.

The program runs fine as a "nawk" script on a Sun box running SunOS 5.6.

Turning on --lint also tells me that a whole pile of functions are not
reachable.

Any advice on overcoming this would be deeply appreciated. ( i suspect
that i need to
break this into a number of source files and ref them on the command
line per --files; but
I'd like to know for sure before I go there if any alternative exists)

Also, under the sunos nawk the close() function will work without the
parens i.e. "close myCommandString;"
It is easy to work around ,but might be useful to have it noted in the
man pages.

This gawk program is the most recent cygwin release ( as loaded from the
net 2 weeks ago) for nt. This PC has lots of memory ( 256 mb). The
version info is :

$ gawk --version
GNU Awk 3.0.4
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991-1999 Free Software Foundation...


My apologies for asking this question directly rather than first asking
in comp.lang.awk; but my employer has the news groups blocked.

Hope you can help.
Thanks in advance.
..Richard