Re: "sed" question

On 8/3/2024 10:46 pm, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 08.03.2024 10:03, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote:

>
The original Awk doesn't support regular expressions, right?

 Where did you get that from? - Awk without regexps makes little sense;
mind that the basic syntax of Awk programs is described as
   /pattern/ { action }
What would remain if there's no regexp patterns; string comparisons?
 

Because regex was not yet talked about back then??

 Stable Awk (1985) was released 1987. The (initial) old Awk (1977) was
released 1979. Before that tool we had Sed (1974), and before that we
had Ed and Grep (1973). My perception is that regexps were there as a
basic concept of UNIX in all these tools, so why should Awk be exempt.
According to the authors Awk was designed to see how Sed and Grep could
be generalized.

That part of history is beyond me. Sorry... my fault for not doing a check.