You should never use C if you can do it with a script;
You should never use a script if you can do it with awk;
Never use awk if you can do it with sed;
Never use sed if you can do it with grep."
Awk is a good old-fashioned UNIX filtering tool invented in the
1970s. The language is simple and Awk programs are generally very
short. Awk is useful when the overheads of more sophisticated
approaches is not worth the bother.
Also, the cost of learning Awk is very low.
But aren't there better scripting languages?
Faster? Well, maybe yes and maybe no.
And Awk is old (mid-70s). Aren't modern languages more productive?
Well
again, maybe yes and maybe no. One measure of the productivity of a
language is how lines of code are required to code up one business level
`function point'.
Compared to many
popular languages, GAWK scores very highly:
loc/fp language
------ --------
6, excel 5
13, sql
21, awk <================
21, perl
21, eiffel
21, clos
21, smalltalk
29, delphi
29, visual basic 5
49, ada 95
49, ai shells
53, c++
53, java
64, lisp
71, ada 83
71, fortran 95
80, 3rd generation default
91, ansi cobol 85
91, pascal
107, 2nd generation default
107, algol 68
107, cobol
107, fortran
128, c
320, 1st generation default
640, machine language
3200, natural language
Anyway, there are other considerations. Awk is real succinct, simple
enough to teach, and easy enough to recode in C (if you want raw speed).
For example, here's the complete listing of someone's Awk spell-checking program.
BEGIN {while (getline<"Usr.Dict.Words") dict[$0]=1}
!dict[$1] {print $1}
Sure, there's about a gazillion enhancements you'd like to make on this one but you gotta say, this is real succinct.
Awk is the cure for late execution
of software syndrome (a.k.a. LESS). The symptoms of LESS are a huge time
delay before a new idea is executable.
Awk programmers can hack up usable
systems in the time it takes other programmers to boot their IDE.
And, as a result of that easy exploration, it is possible to find loopholes missed by other analyst that
lead to the innovative better solution to the problems (e.g. see Ronald Loui's O(nlogn)
clustering tool).
Certainly, we can drool over the language features offered by more advanced
languages like pointers, generic iterators, continuations, etc etc. And
Awk's lack of data structures (except num, string, and array) requires
some discipline to handle properly.
But experienced Awk programmers know that the cleverer
the program, the
smaller the audience gets.
If it is possible for to explain something
succinctly in a simple language like Awk, then it is also possible that
more folks will read that code.
Finally, at this may be the most important point, it might be misguided to argue about Awk vs LanguageX in terms
of the specifics of those languages.
Awk programmers can't over-elaborate their solutions- they are forced to code the solution in the
simplest manner possible. This push to simplicity, to the essence of the problem, can be an insightful process.
Coding in Awk is like preserving fruit- you boil
off everything that is superfluous, that needlessly bloats the material what you are working with.
It is amazing how little code is required to code the core of an idea (e.g. see Darius Bacon's
LISP interpreter, written in Awk).
