nostalgia (Was: Beta release of gawk 5.3.1)

In article <6e0e7ec8b0e0bcff69f6ce253326724254e5528c.camel@tilde.green>,
Annada Behera  <segfault@tilde.green> wrote:

On Thu, 2024-08-29 at 07:03 +0000, Aharon Robbins wrote:

7. The never-documented --nostalgia option has been removed. It was
 causing bug reports.

>
I've never heard of the --nostalgia flag before. Now that it has been
removed, I am curious--what did it do?
>

(pts/1:65) % gawk4 --nostalgia
awk: bailing out near line 1
Abort (core dumped)
(pts/1:66) %

When I saw this thread, my first reaction was to ask the same question as
you did.  Then, I figured it was probably one of those questions that
shouldn't be asked - like talking about Fight Club.

So, I grepped the source code (that I had lying around), and found several
references in "main.c".  You can, of course, do the same.

Note, BTW, that it looks like this function only gets compiled in if the
preprocessor symbol NOSTALGIA is defined, which you'd think would be
off-by-default, but apparently that is not the case.

--
The randomly chosen signature file that would have appeared here is more than 4
lines long.  As such, it violates one or more Usenet RFCs.  In order to remain
in compliance with said RFCs, the actual sig can be found at the following URL:
http://user.xmission.com/~gazelle/Sigs/RightWingMedia