Re: AWK As A Major Systems Programming Language

Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

I have worked for several years in Python. For string manipulation
and processing records, you still have to write all the manual stuff:
open the file, read lines in a loop, split them, etc. Awk does all
this stuff for me.

 
 On the flip side, you can peep it like this: Python's got a solid
 set of statement types you can use for everything, making the code
 hella readable. Meanwhile, awk's got its bag of tricks for special
 cases like file and string processing. Just compare [1] with [2].
 
 [1]

[snip]

Weird, as someone who doesn't use much of Python or AWK, I look at
your examples as clearly demonstrating that the AWK version is much
easier to read. I wonder if the Python version is more complicated
than it needs to be actually.

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