Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!educ-isis!teexnma
From: teexnma@ioe.lon.ac.uk (Nino Margetic)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Re: NROFF for PC (actually: AWK and AWF :-)
Summary: AWF and MSDOS: do they work???
Keywords: AWF, AWK, NROFF for MSDOS
Message-ID: <1990Dec11.191456.10816@ioe.lon.ac.uk>
Date: 11 Dec 90 19:14:56 GMT
References: <1990Dec7.000432.6440@magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu> <1990Dec7.154008.9373@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <1990Dec10.191405.6058@ioe.lon.ac.uk> <1990Dec10.223321.2738@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Reply-To: teexnma@ioe.lon.ac.uk (Nino Margetic)
Followup-To: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Organization: Dept. of Medical Physics - University College London
Lines: 54

In article <1990Dec10.223321.2738@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> Ran Atkinson <randall@Virginia.EDU> writes:
>In article <1990Dec10.191405.6058@ioe.lon.ac.uk> teexnma@ioe.lon.ac.uk (Nino Margetic) writes:
>
>>Best to my knowledge, the original AWF (Amazingly Workable Formater)
>>DID NOT WORK on the 16 bit machines, ie under MSDOS. However, I do
>>remeber that someone claimed to have ported it to MSDOS... Since I
>>myself am also interested in a nroff(ish) beastie, could someone
>>confirm this??
>
>Since AWF is written in the Awk Language, whether the AWF works should
>depend on whether your Awk interpreter works properly, not on your OS
>or hardware.
>

*** I quite agree. What I ment to say was: AWK run out of memory while
running AWF. At the moment I'm not sure which version of AWK was I
running when I tested the AWF, but it could have been either GNU AWK
v.2.10 or 2.11. I'm not sure which is the most current version, so I'd
like to hear from people who run AWF and AWK under MSDOS (no additives
please :-).

>I suspect that older versions of GAWK, which had problems which are
>fixed in more recent ones, might have had problems -- not just on
>MSDOS but all systems.  In short, I question whether it was an AWF
>problem rather than a problem with some people's older versions of
>GAWK for MSDOS.  I personally use MKS Awk and have seen no problems.
>
>If anyone has run into problems that are due to AWF and not due to an
>erroneous or incomplete version of the Awk language, I'd be interested
>in hearing about them and the author of AWF probably would be too...
>
>Ran
>randall@Virginia.EDU
>

If my memory still serves me, the problem with the original AWF as
distributed by Henry Spencer (henry@zoo.toronto.edu), when running under 
MSDOS, was with nested loops in the AWF script, and the person who later 
claimed that he/she has done the "port" to MSDOS, said that he/she only 
changed AWF to reduce the number of levels in nested loops.
To be honest, I haven't tried running the AWF script since the time it
was originally released (after my first trial has failed).
N.B. If I rememeber correct, Henry Spencer himself was very skeptic
about running his script on 16bit machines (see README file in the original
distribution of AWF - comp.sources.unix, v23, issue 27; released
Sept 7th 1990).

--Nino

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