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Comment by jph | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations and thank you! Namespaces are a big help for me personally.

From the GNU Awk 5 manual: A qualified name consists of a two simple identifiers joined by a double colon (::). The left-hand identifier represents the namespace and the right-hand identifier is the variable within it.

Namespaces are a big help for writing libraries, especially for clients with systems (e.g. banking, government, education, medical) where awk code is fine yet other kinds of languages (e.g. python, go, perl) are not available and/or require management audit practices.

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Thanks for pointing to the Awk 5 manual (in the tar archive, I haven't seen it online still).

I've written the previous comment asking "why namespaces based" only on the directly online accessible info. Now having had the time to download and unpack the sources and read the documentation there, it sounds much better than it appeared based on the announcement.

Long term it shouldn't make gawk less compatible than it already is. Gawk already has gawk-specific extensions, and that would be one. It seems that the command-line example is the only "breaking" aspect. And even that could be theoretically modified to be non breaking, but it's hopefully seldom enough used to not affect too much.

And the "namespaces" is in fact a "module" infrastructure extension, introduced specifically to support the construction of module-like libraries (specifically solving the problem of exporting the limited number of variables from the module).

I especially like the writing of the author of Gawk manual, I've really enjoyed it even almost thirty years ago.

Why would awk not require audit and code management practices vs those other languages in a controlled environment?

Probably because awk is available as a stock build of the approved OS. It's been around a long time. I mean, to be POSIX-compliant, you need an awk interpreter in your system https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/a...

I took it to mean that getting support for those languages would require management audit practices i.e. "why are we installing a new package on all of our servers?". In that case, awk would be better since the gnutils are much more likely to already be installed and in use. The resulting awk code would still probably fall under code management.

Go, you mentioned, does not require package to be installed. It compiles to a single, native binary.

If the place you worked at was backwards enough you may not be able to install a Go compiler on your desktop. Anything is possible when the people making the rules are disconnected enough from the people getting the work done.

This. If I want anything installed it requires survey from IT and Legal and can take months.

If it is Java or C# and already in-use, it is pretty simple. If I wanted to install a Go compiler, it could get complicated. Not having Admin rights really slows down an organization. Especially if you're someone who likes to use multiple technologies (right tool for the right job). IT hates that. Note that I don't write production tools, just things to get my job done quicker (automation scripts, data analysis...etc).

always assumed all those organizations stayed in the 90s

not figuratively

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