On Monday, 15 February 2016 at 03:58:31 UTC-7, PaulCAnagnos wrote:
> I received the TAWK code base from Pat Thompson roughly four years ago. A friend an I have been enhancing it and are now up to version 6.6. If you were a Thompson customer before Pat closed up shop, I can send you a copy of v6.6. It runs only on Windows.
>
> ~~ Paul

I know TAWK was a commercial product, many years ago. What's it going to take to get the source code public? It sounds like TAWK is at extreme risk of being lost forever as your post is now 6 years old without even a new closed-source release you've been working on. For all I know you (Paul), and Pat, are dead and the damage is done - TAWK is gone, never to be re-built or cross-compiled for Linux. Maybe at least consider selling the source for release, so that a group of individuals can group together and make this happen? It's not like keeping TAWK closed source is going to get an iota of financial gain in this day and age.

On 2022-04-28, Jeff Paranich <jparanich@gmail.com> wrote:
^^^^^^^
> On Monday, 15 February 2016 at 03:58:31 UTC-7, PaulCAnagnos wrote:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Please avoid necroposting, without an amunt of justification
proportional to the "years old" parameter.

--
TXR Programming Language: http://nongnu.org/txr
Cygnal: Cygwin Native Application Library: http://kylheku.com/cygnal

In article <2076db66-4ab7-425f-93cd-4df5502bbb59n@googlegroups.com>,
Jeff Paranich <jparanich@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Monday, 15 February 2016 at 03:58:31 UTC-7, PaulCAnagnos wrote:
>> I received the TAWK code base from Pat Thompson roughly four years
>> ago. A friend an I have been enhancing it and are now up to version
>> 6.6. If you were a Thompson customer before Pat closed up shop, I can
>> send you a copy of v6.6. It runs only on Windows.
>>
>> ~~ Paul
>
>I know TAWK was a commercial product, many years ago. What's it going
>to take to get the source code public? It sounds like TAWK is at
>extreme risk of being lost forever as your post is now 6 years old
>without even a new closed-source release you've been working on. For
>all I know you (Paul), and Pat, are dead and the damage is done -
>TAWK is gone, never to be re-built or cross-compiled for Linux. Maybe
>at least consider selling the source for release, so that a group of
>individuals can group together and make this happen? It's not like
>keeping TAWK closed source is going to get an iota of financial gain in
>this day and age.

+1 (!)

In particular, a Linux version should be the real target.
Note that there always was a Solaris version (in addition to all the
various DOS/Windows versions), so it is not like creating a Unix version
would be a "de novo" effort. In fact, although I don't know this for sure,
my reading of the tea leaves is that it was originally developed on Solaris
and then ported/deployed to DOS (etc).

There should be some way to make this happen.

It would be a good thing to have 2 (rather than just 1) good AWK
implementation available on Linux.

--
Donald Drumpf claims to be "the least racist person you'll ever meet".

This would be true if the only other person you've ever met was David Duke.

In article <20220428131244.865@kylheku.com>,
Kaz Kylheku <480-992-1380@kylheku.com> wrote:
>On 2022-04-28, Jeff Paranich <jparanich@gmail.com> wrote:
> ^^^^^^^
>> On Monday, 15 February 2016 at 03:58:31 UTC-7, PaulCAnagnos wrote:
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>Please avoid necroposting, without an amunt of justification
>proportional to the "years old" parameter.

Don't be silly. It does not become you.

--
In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.
-- Barack Obama --

On 4/28/2022 12:44 PM, Jeff Paranich wrote:
> On Monday, 15 February 2016 at 03:58:31 UTC-7, PaulCAnagnos wrote:
>> I received the TAWK code base from Pat Thompson roughly four years ago. A friend an I have been enhancing it and are now up to version 6.6. If you were a Thompson customer before Pat closed up shop, I can send you a copy of v6.6. It runs only on Windows.
>>
>> ~~ Paul
>
> I know TAWK was a commercial product, many years ago. What's it going to take to get the source code public? It sounds like TAWK is at extreme risk of being lost forever as your post is now 6 years old without even a new closed-source release you've been working on. For all I know you (Paul), and Pat, are dead and the damage is done - TAWK is gone, never to be re-built or cross-compiled for Linux. Maybe at least consider selling the source for release, so that a group of individuals can group together and make this happen? It's not like keeping TAWK closed source is going to get an iota of financial gain in this day and age.

Not trying to be facetious, I just seriously want to know -

1) Why try to keep using tawk instead of just using gawk or switching to
some other tool that's currently still being actively developed,
supported, and documented?

2) If tawk has some features that gawk doesn't then why not put the
effort into contributing support of such features to gawk instead of
resurrecting tawk?

3) Given we already have BWK awk, "one true awk", oawk, nawk, BSD awk,
XPG awk, busybox awk, gawk, and maybe others I'm forgetting), is
whatever tawk brings to the table really worth it to have yet another
awk variant around to muddy the waters further on what an "awk" script is?

Regards,

Ed.

On 2022-04-28, Kenny McCormack <gazelle@shell.xmission.com> wrote:
> In article <20220428131244.865@kylheku.com>,
> Kaz Kylheku <480-992-1380@kylheku.com> wrote:
>>On 2022-04-28, Jeff Paranich <jparanich@gmail.com> wrote:
>> ^^^^^^^
>>> On Monday, 15 February 2016 at 03:58:31 UTC-7, PaulCAnagnos wrote:
>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>
>>Please avoid necroposting, without an amunt of justification
>>proportional to the "years old" parameter.
>
> Don't be silly. It does not become you.

Why would silly become me, when it can just wait for me to become it?

--
TXR Programming Language: http://nongnu.org/txr
Cygnal: Cygwin Native Application Library: http://kylheku.com/cygnal

> 1) Why try to keep using tawk instead of just using gawk or switching to
> some other tool that's currently still being actively developed,
> supported, and documented?
>
> 2) If tawk has some features that gawk doesn't then why not put the
> effort into contributing support of such features to gawk instead of
> resurrecting tawk?
>
> 3) Given we already have BWK awk, "one true awk", oawk, nawk, BSD awk,
> XPG awk, busybox awk, gawk, and maybe others I'm forgetting), is
> whatever tawk brings to the table really worth it to have yet another
> awk variant around to muddy the waters further on what an "awk" script is?
>
> Regards,
>
> Ed.

Not unfounded comments - but also perhaps for all the same reasons these arguments can justify why TAWK should be open source now, in the name of preservation if nothing else. I agree, nobody is going to take the source and run with it as a million dollar business - it would probably not have a single pull request - but it's terrible to lose such a significant piece of work. There are so many competitors (as you point out), there's probably not a huge motivation to extend TAWK; but certainly I think there would be users who'd love the re-compile it with the latest GCC and compiler optimizations, taking advantage of much newer architecture, and use it for their personal use. Alas; few of us have time to contribute to filling any gaps in Gawk, that TAWK had.

Regarding "raising from the dead" old threads. It's zero-cost to you; newsgroups are hanging by a thread - be gracious, there are still people posting at all.

On 2022-04-28, Jeff Paranich <jparanich@gmail.com> wrote:
> Regarding "raising from the dead" old threads. It's zero-cost to you;
> newsgroups are hanging by a thread - be gracious, there are still
> people posting at all.

Someone replying to 8 year old posts probably deserves at least a
heads-up, though. Next time I will just do that without the
don't-do-that.

--
TXR Programming Language: http://nongnu.org/txr
Cygnal: Cygwin Native Application Library: http://kylheku.com/cygnal

On 4/28/2022 4:56 PM, Jeff Paranich wrote:
>> 1) Why try to keep using tawk instead of just using gawk or switching to
>> some other tool that's currently still being actively developed,
>> supported, and documented?
>>
>> 2) If tawk has some features that gawk doesn't then why not put the
>> effort into contributing support of such features to gawk instead of
>> resurrecting tawk?
>>
>> 3) Given we already have BWK awk, "one true awk", oawk, nawk, BSD awk,
>> XPG awk, busybox awk, gawk, and maybe others I'm forgetting), is
>> whatever tawk brings to the table really worth it to have yet another
>> awk variant around to muddy the waters further on what an "awk" script is?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Ed.
>
> Not unfounded comments - but also perhaps for all the same reasons these arguments can justify why TAWK should be open source now, in the name of preservation if nothing else. I agree, nobody is going to take the source and run with it as a million dollar business - it would probably not have a single pull request - but it's terrible to lose such a significant piece of work. There are so many competitors (as you point out), there's probably not a huge motivation to extend TAWK; but certainly I think there would be users who'd love the re-compile it with the latest GCC and compiler optimizations, taking advantage of much newer architecture, and use it for their personal use. Alas; few of us have time to contribute to filling any gaps in Gawk, that TAWK had.

I was really hoping you'd tell us what it is about tawk that you can't
do in gawk (or some other awk or using some other tool) that makes it
worth resurrecting tawk and adding yet another awk variant to the
already too-large pool of available awk variants. You said "I think
there would be users who'd love the re-compile it" - and I'm trying to
understand why when other supported tools already exist to do whatever
it is those people want to do. Resurrecting tawk because at one time it
was significant in some way doesn't seem like a good reason but that may
just be my opinion.

>
> Regarding "raising from the dead" old threads. It's zero-cost to you; newsgroups are hanging by a thread - be gracious, there are still people posting at all.

I didn't say anything about that, that was another poster.

Ed.

In article <21502b9c-8539-4278-8cb9-58221c995af3n@googlegroups.com>,
Jeff Paranich <jparanich@gmail.com> wrote:
>Not unfounded comments - but also perhaps for all the same reasons these
>arguments can justify why TAWK should be open source now, in the name of
>preservation if nothing else.

This makes the most sense. It was an interesting and powerful program
at the time, and interesting code is usually worth reading to learn from.
(Even the gawk maintainer has revived old Unix code to make it more
easily available for reading and for playing with [see his github].)

It's unlikely that anyone would invest the effort to make tawk on
Linux production worthy, but stranger things have happened. Although,
without the source, we'll never know.

On Friday, 29 April 2022 at 04:23:58 UTC-4, Mack The Knife wrote:
> In article <21502b9c-8539-4278...@googlegroups.com>,
> Jeff Paranich <jpar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >Not unfounded comments - but also perhaps for all the same reasons these
> >arguments can justify why TAWK should be open source now, in the name of
> >preservation if nothing else.
> This makes the most sense. It was an interesting and powerful program
> at the time, and interesting code is usually worth reading to learn from.
> (Even the gawk maintainer has revived old Unix code to make it more
> easily available for reading and for playing with [see his github].)
>
> It's unlikely that anyone would invest the effort to make tawk on
> Linux production worthy, but stranger things have happened. Although,
> without the source, we'll never know.

re: "tell us what it is about tawk that you can't do in gawk"
Not to beat a dead fish, but I always used TAWK to "compile" awk programs so end-users would not hack them. Obviously the "compiler" was a wrapper for the TAWK interpreter. I am NOT asking for the GNU volunteers to undertake that task. I just miss it ... There are a hundred things I can now do in gawk that I couldn't in tawk, circa 1999+.

In article <4fa43971-8699-4df2-9288-9a0b25a19316n@googlegroups.com>,
J Naman <jnaman2@gmail.com> wrote:
>re: "tell us what it is about tawk that you can't do in gawk"
>Not to beat a dead fish, but I always used TAWK to "compile" awk programs
>so end-users would not hack them.

This likely would never happen in gawk anyway, as it goes against the
spirit of Free Software.

>I am NOT asking for the GNU volunteers to undertake that task.

So then all is good. :-)

There are other ways to accomplilsh that goal, anyway, they're just
not so straightforward.