Path: utzoo!telly!ddsw1!lll-winken!pacbell!rtech!gonzo!daveb
From: daveb@gonzo.UUCP (Dave Brower)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Re: (G)AWK for VMS?
Message-ID: <627@gonzo.UUCP>
Date: 7 Apr 89 05:37:04 GMT
References: <8904031717.AA02441@smithkline.com>
Reply-To: daveb@gonzo.UUCP (Dave Brower)
Distribution: gnu
Organization: Gonzo Media Group
Lines: 44

In <8904031717.AA02441@smithkline.com> wordmj%phvax.dnet@SMITHKLINE.COM (Mike Word, L302, 6491) writes:

>Has anyone ported awk to VMS?  We are looking for a stable and reliable
>version to run under VMS 5.0.  Attempts at porting gawk in-house have
>been less than satisfactory.  In the latest version, associative array
>indexes are getting scrambled occasionally and we haven't had the chance
>to track down the culprit.
>
>At the moment we are trying to get info on VAX SCAN as an alternative to
>awk for parsing but I really like awk and wish I didn't have to give it
>up.  Any suggestions? > >Thanks

We ported both gawk and nawk to VMS without much difficulty (modulo
things like piped output).  Both had some problems.  Gawk, on a pure
4.3-tahoe system gave me some hashing problems that sound suspisiously
like those you allude to.  I haven't tracked them down at all, but it
sounds like a bug bug rather than a porting problem.  Nawk wouldn't
correctly run the little graph program in The Book correctly.  [Mind
you, the program in The Book has some errors of its own.]

Gawk seems to be significantly slower than nawk; sorry I can't provide
details at the moment.  It also runs in _much_ more memory when doing
things using large arrays.

So, I can't say I'm happy with any of them yet.  Usually both work OK,
but if one doesn't the other usually does.  It _does_ put the burden on
you to sanity check the output, which is really a pain.

----

On another front, I've nearly gotten GCC 1.34 working on Xenix
2.3.1; unfortunately it spits out AT&T syntax rather than MASM, so you
need a non-standard assembler.  ius anyone working on the partial
masm386.c file present in the distribution, but unused?

I will post details and diffs later, but suffice it to say it requires
either a binary to boot or a handy other machine where you can run a
cross-gcc.  This is much like VMS :-(.

-dB
-- 
"Why would a man like you...?"			
			        "It seemed like the thing to do at the time."
{sun,mtxinu,amdahl,hoptoad}!rtech!gonzo!daveb	daveb@gonzo.uucp