1 Copyright (C) 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3 Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
4 are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
5 notice and this notice are preserved.
7 Changes from 4.1.0 to 4.1.1
8 ---------------------------
10 1. The "stat" extension now includes a "devbsize" element which indicates
11 the units for the "nblocks" element.
13 2. The extension facility now works on MinGW. Many of the extensions can be
14 built and used directly.
16 3. A number of bugs in the pretty-printing / profiling code have been fixed.
18 4. Sockets and two-way pipes now work under MinGW.
20 5. The debugger now lists source code correctly under Cygwin.
22 6. Configuration and building with the Mac OS X libreadline should work now.
24 7. The -O option now works again.
26 8. The --include option, documented since 4.0, now actually works.
28 9. Infrastructure updated to automake 1.13.4, bison 3.0.2, and
31 10. The configure script now accepts a --disable-extensions option,
32 which disables checking for and building the extensions.
34 11. The VMS port has been considerably improved. In particular config.h
35 is now generated by a DCL script. Also, the extension facility works
36 and several of the extensions can be built and used. Currently, the
37 extension facility only works on Alpha and Itanium.
39 12. The API now provides functions pointers for malloc(), calloc(),
40 realloc() and free(), to insure that the same memory allocation
41 functions are always used. This bumps the minor version by one.
43 13. The printf quote flag now works correctly in locales with a different
44 decimal point character but without a thousands separator character.
45 If the thousands separator is a string, it will be correctly added
48 14. The readfile extension now has an input parser that will read whole
49 files as a single record.
51 15. A number of bugs have been fixed. See the ChangeLog.
53 Changes from 4.0.2 to 4.1.0
54 ---------------------------
56 1. The three executables gawk, pgawk, and dgawk, have been merged into
57 one, named just gawk. As a result:
58 * The -R option is gone
59 * Use -D to run the debugger. An optional file argument is a
60 list of commands to run first.
61 * Use -o to do pretty-printing only.
62 * Use -p to do profiling.
63 This considerably reduces gawk's "footprint" and eases the documentation
66 2. Gawk now supports high precision arithmetic with MPFR. The default is
67 still double precision, but setting PREC changes things, or using
68 the -M / --bignum options. This support is not compiled in if the MPFR
69 library is not available.
71 3. The new -i option (from xgawk) is used for loading awk library files.
72 This differs from -f in that the first non-option argument is treated
75 4. The new -l option (from xgawk) is used for loading dynamic extensions.
77 5. The dynamic extension interface has been completely redone! There is
78 now a defined API for C extensions to use. A C extension acts like
79 a function written in awk, except that it cannot do everything that awk
80 code can. However, this allows interfacing to any facility that is
81 available from C. This is a major development, see the doc, which has
82 a nice shiny new chapter describing everything.
84 This support is not compiled in if dynamic loading of shared libraries
87 The old extension mechanism is still supported for compatiblity, but
88 it will most definitely be removed at the next major release.
90 6. The "inplace" extension, built using the new facility, can be used to
91 simulate the GNU "sed -i" feature.
93 7. The and(), or() and xor() functions now take any number of arguments,
94 with a minimum of two.
96 8. New arrays: SYMTAB, FUNCTAB, and PROCINFO["identifiers"]. SYMTAB allows
97 indirect access to any defined variable or array; it is possible to
98 "walk" the symbol table, if that should be necessary.
100 9. Support for building gawk with a cross compiler has been improved.
102 10. Infrastructure upgrades: bison 2.7.1, gettext 0.18.2.1, automake 1.13.1,
103 libtool 2.4.2 for the extensions.
105 Changes from 4.0.1 to 4.0.2
106 ---------------------------
108 1. Infrastructure upgrades: Autoconf 2.69, Automake 1.12.6, bison 2.7.
110 2. `fflush()', `nextfile', and `delete array' are all now part of POSIX.
112 3. fflush() behavior changed to match BWK awk and for POSIX - now both
113 fflush() and fflush("") flush all open output redirections.
115 4. Various minor bug fixes and documentation updates.
117 Changes from 4.0.0 to 4.0.1
118 ---------------------------
120 1. The default handling of backslash in sub() and gsub() has been reverted to
121 the behavior of 3.1. It was silly to think I could break compatibility that
122 way, even for standards compliance.
124 2. Completed the implementation of Rational Range Interpretation.
126 3. Failure to get the group set is no longer a fatal error.
128 4. Lots of minor bugs fixed and portability clean-ups along the way. See
129 the ChangeLog for details.
131 Changes from 3.1.8 to 4.0.0
132 ---------------------------
134 1. The special files /dev/pid, /dev/ppid, /dev/pgrpid and /dev/user are
135 now completely gone. Use PROCINFO instead.
137 2. The POSIX 2008 behavior for `sub' and `gsub' are now the default.
138 THIS CHANGES BEHAVIOR!!!!
140 3. The \s and \S escape sequences are now recognized in regular expressions.
142 4. The split() function accepts an optional fourth argument which is an array
143 to hold the values of the separators.
145 5. The new -b / --characters-as-bytes option means "hands off my data"; gawk
146 won't try to treat input as a multibyte string.
148 6. There is a new --sandbox option; see the doc.
150 7. Indirect function calls are now available.
152 8. Interval expressions are now part of default regular expressions for
155 9. --gen-po is now correctly named --gen-pot.
157 10. switch / case is now enabled by default. There's no longer a need
158 for a configure-time option.
160 11. Gawk now supports BEGINFILE and ENDFILE. See the doc for details.
162 12. Directories named on the command line now produce a warning, not
163 a fatal error, unless --posix or --traditional.
165 13. The new FPAT variable allows you to specify a regexp that matches
166 the fields, instead of matching the field separator. The new patsplit()
167 function gives the same capability for splitting.
169 14. All long options now have short options, for use in `#!' scripts.
171 15. Support for IPv6 is added via the /inet6/... special file. /inet4/...
172 forces IPv4 and /inet chooses the system default (probably IPv4).
174 16. Added a warning for /[:space:]/ that should be /[[:space:]]/.
176 17. Merged with John Haque's byte code internals. Adds dgawk debugger and
177 possibly improved performance.
179 18. `break' and `continue' are no longer valid outside a loop, even with
182 19. POSIX character classes work with --traditional (BWK awk supports them).
184 20. Nuked redundant --compat, --copyleft, and --usage long options.
186 21. Arrays of arrays added. See the doc.
188 22. Per the GNU Coding Standards, dynamic extensions must now define
189 a global symbol indicating that they are GPL-compatible. See
190 the documentation and example extensions.
191 THIS CHANGES BEHAVIOR!!!!
193 23. In POSIX mode, string comparisons use strcoll/wcscoll.
194 THIS CHANGES BEHAVIOR!!!!
196 24. The option for raw sockets was removed, since it was never implemented.
198 25. Gawk now treats ranges of the form [d-h] as if they were in the C
199 locale, no matter what kind of regexp is being used, and even if
200 --posix. The latest POSIX standard allows this, and the documentation
201 has been updated. Maybe this will stop all the questions about
202 [a-z] matching uppercase letters.
203 THIS CHANGES BEHAVIOR!!!!
205 26. PROCINFO["strftime"] now holds the default format for strftime().
207 27. Updated to latest infrastructure: Autoconf 2.68, Automake 1.11.1,
208 Gettext 0.18.1, Bison 2.5.
210 28. Many code cleanups. Removed code for many old, unsupported systems:
216 - MS-DOS with Microsoft Compiler
217 - MS-Windows with Microsoft Compiler
219 - SunOS 3.x, Sun 386 (Road Runner)
221 - Prestandard VAX C compiler for VAX/VMS
222 - Probably others that I've forgotten
224 29. If PROCINFO["sorted_in"] exists, for(iggy in foo) loops sort the
225 indices before looping over them. The value of this element
226 provides control over how the indices are sorted before the loop
227 traversal starts. See the manual.
229 30. A new isarray() function exists to distinguish if an item is an array
230 or not, to make it possible to traverse multidimensional arrays.
232 31. asort() and asorti() take a third argument specifying how to sort.