gawk into an array question

[Kevin D. Clark]

Doug writes:

> The similarities are not an accident.  I don't know the exact history,
> but Perl was meant to augment many of the uses of awk and a few other
> command line utilities.  Programming languages that have arisen after
> Perl borrow some of the motifs and not others.  Perl is great as a
> command-line glue, php as a web glue.

This whole thread causes me to smile, because I happen to remember the
source of this famous famous lwall quote:

   Hey, I had to let awk be better at *something*...  :-) 
   -- Larry Wall

...which was here:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.perl/msg/af646f4ae85fcbe4?pli=1

I remember reading this quote in netnews.  Anyways, the whole point of
the quote was that sometimes awk is better than Perl....in particular,
for dealing with columnar data.

I am a very enthusiastic Perl programmer, and I recommend the language
highly, but I do admit that I frequently write small awk programs when
I have to deal with columnar data.  By "small" I mean "probably less
than 80 characters" -- beyond that, the Swiss Army Chainsaw comes out.

Yes, it is no accident that Perl seems very familiar to people like me
who started out writing C and shell/awk/sed scripts -- Perl borrowed
heavily from these things.



Since the original poster is interested in Perl, please let me give
three pieces of advice:

1:  use "use strict;"

2:  use "use warnings;"

3:  always strive to make your code clear.


Kind regards,

--kevin
-- 
GnuPG ID: B280F24E                Meet me by the knuckles
alumni.unh.edu!kdc                of the skinny-bone tree.
http://kdc-blog.blogspot.com/     -- Tom Waits