AWKGo, an Awk-to-Go Compiler | Hacker News Reader

AWKGo, an Awk-to-Go Compiler

benhoyt.com

74 pointsasicsp6 comments

Go and AWK-related anecdote: When I was at Google and learning Golang we had to go through readability review from people who know how to do idiomatic golang.

One day I realised that my pretty trivial code was being reviewed by the "W" from AWK.

Felt kinda starstruck. He had no review comments on my code :)

Nice! My star-struck story is I had lunch with Peter Weingberger (the W) at Google a couple of years back. Neat guy, smart and opinionated. He was working on VSCode's Go integration, if I remember correctly. Asked him what he would change about AWK if doing it again, he said probably the implicit string concatenation syntax by putting two expressions next to each other.

Would it be possible to mimick dynamic types just be renaming subsequent references?

E.g.

    foo = "test string"
    print(foo)
    foo = 5
    print(foo)

Would compile as:

    foo = "test string"
    print(foo)
    foo__1 = 5
    print(foo__1)

I don't know if the syntax is correct, but hope my point goes thru.

AWK variables are global; only parameters are local. So there should be just one "foo" in the global scope in your example.

Neat! How about go to awk next? (:

Heh, that would be significantly harder. Probably doable, but it'd run quite slowly. Send me the link when you've written it! :-)

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