From: G. Branden Robinson
Subject: Re: The "asort" extension (Was: feature proposal: expand associative
arrays in lexicographic order ...)
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2026 09:57:48 -0500
>> From: Zachary Santer
>> Whenever I see the phrase "sed and awk", I immediately think "No need
>> for sed; whatever sed can do, AWK can do and do better".
Note: When I first saw Zachary's post, I envisioned one of those
typical monstrosities that you often see posted; things like:
cat file | grep ... | sed ... | awk ... | sort ... | awk ... | cut ... |
etc
Maybe I was wrong to assume that. Anyway, I'm frequently amazed at
how often things like this get posted to boards and forums like this,
by people who really ought to know better.
Anyway, ...
>...and whatever AWK can do, sed can do as well. ;-)
I think that's true only for suitable values of "sed" and "awk".
I believe there are features and functionalities in GAWK that are not
present in any version of "sed".
>You can also get a remarkable amount done with dc(1).
>AWK is a very nice language and I've mused elsewhere that it seems to
>occupy--or be terribly close to--a sweet spot in language design.
This. I'm happy to see you post this, since it is something I have
long thought about AWK. That it really is the sweet spot of language
design. Powerful enough to do pretty much anything I want to do, yet
high level enough that you don't spend time typing things like:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <this.h>
#include <that.h>
etc
etc
then
int main(dadada, etc)
and so on, before you actually write any useful code.
I've never been impressed with Perl/Ruby/Python (the current flavor of
the month) - too much like work, compared to AWK.
=================================================================================
Please do not send me replies to my posts on the list.
I always read the replies via the web archive, so CC'ing to me is unnecessary.
When responding to my posts, please try to refrain from giving bureaucratic
answers. If you have nothing useful to say, then just click Next and go on.
BTW, ain't interested in kludgey workarounds - got enough of my own!
(YT id: 6H1lcubN0oE)
