Fw: awk standard incompatibility

[Denys Vlasenko]

address@hidden wrote on 22.06.2006 14:33:49:
> To: address@hidden
> cc: Rob Landley <address@hidden>, Dmitry Zakharov <address@hidden>
>
> Hi Arnold,
>
> I came across a small problem which looked at first like
> busybox's awk bug
>
> http://busybox.net/bugs/view.php?id=914
>
> but now it looks like it's gawk being a bit non-standard compliant,
> and addsym.awk script in that bug report (it is taken
> verbatim from openoffice build process) runs fine with gawk
> exactly because gawk has that incompatibility.
>
> Busybox people can "fix" their awk code so that it mimics gawk,
> but is it a right thing to do?
>
> How can this be resolved in long term? I think
> we all want software be standard-compliant, but fixing it
> right away in gawk will break things.
>
> Maybe gawk can emit a warning like:
>
> WARNING: Unescaped {} are deprecated. This will stop working
> in the future version of gawk. Please update your script
>
> and then it can be fixed.
> --
> vda