Gawk 4.0.1 now available

[Aharon Robbins]

Greetings all.

This note announces the next minor release of GNU Awk: version 4.0.1.

The following files may be retrieved from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gawk,
or via HTTP from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gawk:

-rw-r--r-- 1 arnold arnold 2680974 Mar 28 22:03 gawk-4.0.1.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 arnold arnold 1612448 Mar 28 22:03 gawk-4.0.1.tar.xz

This is a bug fix release. The relevant part of the NEWS file is
appended below.

Differences from gawk 4.0.0 are not available.

The usual GNU build incantation should be used:

tar -xpvzf gawk-4.0.1.tar.gz
cd gawk-4.0.1
./configure && make && make check

Bug reports should be sent to bug-...@gnu.org.

Enjoy!

Arnold Robbins (on behalf of all the gawk developers)
arn...@skeeve.com
------------------------------------------------------------
Changes from 4.0.0 to 4.0.1
---------------------------

1. The default handling of backslash in sub() and gsub() has been reverted to
the behavior of 3.1. It was silly to think I could break compatibility that
way, even for standards compliance.

2. Completed the implementation of Rational Range Interpretation.

3. Failure to get the group set is no longer a fatal error.

4. Lots of minor bugs fixed and portability clean-ups along the way. See
the ChangeLog for details.
--
Aharon (Arnold) Robbins arnold AT skeeve DOT com
P.O. Box 354 Home Phone: +972 8 979-0381
Nof Ayalon Cell Phone: +972 50 729-7545
D.N. Shimshon 99785 ISRAEL

[Kaz Kylheku]

On 2012-03-29, Aharon Robbins <arn...@skeeve.com> wrote:
> 1. The default handling of backslash in sub() and gsub() has been reverted to
> the behavior of 3.1. It was silly to think I could break compatibility that
> way, even for standards compliance.

It's silly to tie your hands behind your back thinking that you have no way to
confront such a thing!

There are ways to manage language transitions like this; just not "cold turkey",
obviously.

What you can do is mark some features as obsolescent and give the users the
time and the tools to flush users of those features out of their code bases.

For that, you need better dialect control and diagnosis options.

You have --traditional (which is useless for this purpose) and --posix,
which is useless also because it disables all extensions (cannot be used
by users who are programming in the GNU awk language).

You need something like, say, --progressive which provides backward
compatibility with earlier gawk releases (and supports all extensions), but
with warnings about things that are going to change in a future version. This
can be used by GNU awk programmers to have a "heads up". In the default mode,
the support for obsolescent behaviors can endure much longer (perhaps forever),
but under --progressive, undesireable things disappear in a couple of years.

Under --posix, you can make the changes cold turkey (at least for anything
which fixes a POSIX nonconformance). If the user wants posix, hit them with
it, and don't bother warning that you made a quiet change.

--posix is for people porting among awks. They are best served by just
moving forward in conformance. If they are stepping on something that is
broken in gawk, they will likely find it when running with other awks;
and likewise they just expect something that works right on other awks
to just work right.

[Aharon Robbins]

Thank you for your advice.

In article <201203291...@kylheku.com>,

[Janis Papanagnou]

Am 29.03.2012 20:51, schrieb Aharon Robbins:
> Greetings all.
>
> This note announces the next minor release of GNU Awk: version 4.0.1.

Thank you!

Janis

> [...]

[Eric Pement]

On Thursday, March 29, 2012 1:51:40 PM UTC-5, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> Greetings all.
>
> This note announces the next minor release of GNU Awk: version 4.0.1.

Thanks very much, Aharon!!

Precompiled binaries of gawk ver. 4.0.1 for 32-bit Windows are now available here:

http://www.klabaster.com/freeware.htm#dl

[pop]

Eric Pement said the following on 4/4/2012 5:29 PM:

Thanks... I needed that!!
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