Awk is a stable, cross platform computer language named for its
authors
Alfred Aho,
Peter Weinberger &
Brian Kernighan. They write:
"Awk is a convenient and expressive programming language that can be
applied to a wide variety of computing and data-manipulation tasks".
In Classic
Shell Scripting, Arnold Robbins & Nelson Beebe confess their Awk bias:
"We like it. A lot.
The simplicity and power of
Awk often make it just the right tool for the
job."
Besides the Bourne shell, Awk is the only other scripting language available in the standard Unix environment.
Implementations of AWK exist as installed software for almost all other operating systems.
Awk is a mature language- it was first implemented in the 1970s.
As a tool from the golden age, it is sometimes called primitive.
It is more accurate to call it
elemental, so tightly focused is the language on what it does best:
quickly converting this into that.
Consequently, throughout history, Awk has been the language of choice for
many famous scientists such as
Leonardo daVinci.
