Beta release of gawk 5.3.1

[Aharon Robbins]

This note is to announce the BETA release of GNU Awk 5.3.1.

It is available from:

https://www.skeeve.com/gawk/gawk-5.3.0c.tar.gz

This is a bug-fix (patch) release.

The important part of the NEWS file is below.

As far as I can tell, the documentation and code have both hit the
freeze point.

So, why do a beta release? So that you, yes you, the end user, can see
if anything I've done breaks gawk for you. Then you can TELL ME ABOUT
IT so that I can fix it for the final release.

Thanks,

Arnold Robbins
***@skeeve.com
---------------------------------------------
Copyright (C) 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
notice and this notice are preserved.

Changes from 5.3.0 to 5.3.x
---------------------------

1. More subtle issues related to uninitialized array elements have
been fixed.

2. A number of bugs in the debugger related to handling of arrays
have been fixed.

3. Some subtle bugs in the API have been fixed.

4. Use of MPFR is now possible again on 32-bit Power PC Mac systems.

5. Race conditions around broken pipes for system() and read and write
pipes should now be closed off.

6. Support for OSF/1 has been removed.

7. The never-documented --nostalgia option has been removed. It was
causing bug reports.

8. The implementation of printf/sprintf has been thoroughly reworked
in order to make the code more maintainable and to fix a goodly
number of corner cases.

9. As usual, there have been several minor code cleanups and bug fixes.
See the ChangeLog for details.

[Annada Behera]

Post by Aharon Robbins
7. The never-documented --nostalgia option has been removed. It was
   causing bug reports.

I've never heard of the --nostalgia flag before. Now that it has been
removed, I am curious--what did it do?

[Kenny McCormack]

Post by Annada Behera

Post by Aharon Robbins
7. The never-documented --nostalgia option has been removed. It was
causing bug reports.

I've never heard of the --nostalgia flag before. Now that it has been
removed, I am curious--what did it do?

(pts/1:65) % gawk4 --nostalgia
awk: bailing out near line 1
Abort (core dumped)
(pts/1:66) %

When I saw this thread, my first reaction was to ask the same question as
you did. Then, I figured it was probably one of those questions that
shouldn't be asked - like talking about Fight Club.

So, I grepped the source code (that I had lying around), and found several
references in "main.c". You can, of course, do the same.

Note, BTW, that it looks like this function only gets compiled in if the
preprocessor symbol NOSTALGIA is defined, which you'd think would be
off-by-default, but apparently that is not the case.

[Kenny McCormack]

In article <vaposi$1artv$***@news.xmission.com>,
Kenny McCormack <***@shell.xmission.com> wrote:
...

Post by Kenny McCormack
Note, BTW, that it looks like this function only gets compiled in if the
preprocessor symbol NOSTALGIA is defined, which you'd think would be
off-by-default, but apparently that is not the case.

Actually, upon further checking (and already having spent way too much time
on this), it seems that the function (and attendant functionality) is
always there; the NOSTALGIA symbol only controls whether or not it is
listed as an option (when gawk is run with no args).

So, if you somehow manage to compile with the symbol defined, then it will
(contrary to what is implied in the OP of this thread), be (somewhat)
documented.