Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ogicse!usenet!jacobs.CS.ORST.EDU!louxj
From: louxj@jacobs.CS.ORST.EDU (John W. Loux)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: Awk
Message-ID: <1991Mar09.192429.4939@lynx.CS.ORST.EDU>
Date: 9 Mar 91 19:24:29 GMT
References: <17851@cgl.ucsf.EDU>
Sender: @lynx.CS.ORST.EDU
Distribution: na
Organization: Solve and Integrate Corp, Corvallis OR
Lines: 22
Nntp-Posting-Host: jacobs.cs.orst.edu

In article <17851@cgl.ucsf.EDU> alonso@maxwell.mmwb.ucsf.edu (Darwin Alonso) writes:
>I have a question concerning what awk compares with the greater
>and less than operators (><). It seems to compare floating point numbers
>if the field is a number, but compares ASCII value (?) if the field
>is not a number.
>Is this intentional?
>
>[...] I couldn't find anything
>on this in the awk book (Aho, Kernigan, Weiberger).

In ``the book'' (The AWK Programming Language by Aho, Kernighan and
Weinberger), page 25 says:

``In a relational comparison, if both operands are numeric, a numeric
comparison is made; otherwise, any numeric operand is converted to a string,
and then the operands are compared as strings.  The strings are compared
character by character using the ordering provided by the machine, most often
the ASCII character set.  One string is said to be `less than' another if it
would appear before the other according to this ordering, e.g., "Canada" <
"China" and "Asia" < "Asian".''

John