From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Taj Khattra To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: configure misery Message-ID: <20031117231626.GA6427@localhost.localdomain> References: <200311171216.hAHCGrov030115@skeeve.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <200311171216.hAHCGrov030115@skeeve.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 15:16:26 -0800 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8dd447ae-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 02:16:53PM +0200, Aharon Robbins wrote: > Yes, mawk is faster, it uses a different internal algorithm (byte codes > vs. recursive tree evaluation). It is also, sadly, unmaintained; there > hasn't been a new release since 1996, and it does have a few bugs. not specific to mawk, and it's unfortunate that whatever bugs it has haven't been fixed (very often i prefer mawk too, unless i require a gawk extension :) ), but this touches on another pet peeve of mine wrt what seems like the current modus operandi: unless you keep releasing updates to a s/w package every so often, people automatically assume that it's unmaintained! bug fixes are always welcome, but more often than not what you end up with is a continuous stream of updates with dubious "enhancements". there is no fixed-point in sight. as Lamport might say (in a different context), it's as if program maintenance is analogous to automobile maintenance, requiring constant tweaking and "lubricating the branch statements and cleaning the pointers" (http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/pubs.html#automobile) -taj