On Mon, 12 Jul 2021 16:25:30 +0200
Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou@hotmail.com> wrote:

[On AWK dark corners.]
> The GNU
> Awk manual has the topic incoherently spread across three chapters.
> It would certainly be helpful to have a more coherent picture and a
> guidance or suggestion (with all the caveats, e.g. about what happens
> with a RS="^$" statement in other awks). There have also performance
> issues been addressed by Arnold in the past, I think that the @load
> option is the fastest because it bypasses the regexp processing,
> which would aid the user to make an informed choice what to use when.
>
> Until we have such a "directive" I fear we'll repeat our discussions
> every couple years again, and they seem to not be quickly terminated
> discussions on every re-iteration. ;-)

The only person who can provide authoritative answers is Arnold Robbins. I
think he reads comp.lang.awk but I'm not sure if he reads comp.unix.shell
so you should have crossposted to comp.lang.awk (which I've done). As I'm
typing this , I can see that several more posts have been made in the thread
discussing esoteric issues regarding AWK .It would have served everyone best
if these also appeared on comp.lang.awk .

On 12.07.2021 23:22, Spiros Bousbouras wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Jul 2021 16:25:30 +0200
> Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> [On AWK dark corners.]
>> The GNU
>> Awk manual has the topic incoherently spread across three chapters.
>> It would certainly be helpful to have a more coherent picture and a
>> guidance or suggestion (with all the caveats, e.g. about what happens
>> with a RS="^$" statement in other awks). There have also performance
>> issues been addressed by Arnold in the past, I think that the @load
>> option is the fastest because it bypasses the regexp processing,
>> which would aid the user to make an informed choice what to use when.
>>
>> Until we have such a "directive" I fear we'll repeat our discussions
>> every couple years again, and they seem to not be quickly terminated
>> discussions on every re-iteration. ;-)
>
> The only person who can provide authoritative answers is Arnold Robbins. I
> think he reads comp.lang.awk but I'm not sure if he reads comp.unix.shell
> so you should have crossposted to comp.lang.awk (which I've done). As I'm
> typing this , I can see that several more posts have been made in the thread
> discussing esoteric issues regarding AWK .It would have served everyone best
> if these also appeared on comp.lang.awk .

You are right, the focus got shifted. And also the subject needs an
adjustment (in CUS and CLA; which I've done here for comp.lang.awk).

Janis