Re: Can Lua replace awk?

[Ralph Hempel <rhempel@...>]

On 03/07/2011 10:29 PM, Miles Bader wrote:
> kevin beckford<chiggsy@lazyweb.ca>  writes:
> > That's it. Ten years ago, awk was ten years obsolete.
>
> Hardly.  Awk is an elegant and expressive little language, especially
> for a certain (fairly common) problem domain.

Agreed - just the other day I used awk to buzz through a file
of about 500,000 datapoints from a datalogger and was able
to filter out the 400 transition points of interest so they
could be put into a spreadsheet and graphed quickly.

In its proper place, it's a very powerful tool.

I've used it to parse S-Records to pull checksums out
of code images, add checksums to them and to add
other custom bits that the compiler and linker could
not know about until the chips were actually programmed.

Ralph