Unix Legend Adding Unicode Support To AWK - Once He Figures Out Git

Co-creator of core Unix utility, now 80, just needs to run a few more tests. From a report: A Princeton professor, finding a little time for himself in the summer academic lull, emailed an old friend a couple months ago. Brian Kernighan said hello, asked how their US visit was going, and dropped off hundreds of lines of code that could add Unicode support for AWK, the text-parsing tool he helped create for Unix at Bell Labs in 1977. "I have tested this a fair amount but clearly more tests are needed," Kernighan wrote in the email, posted as a kind of pseduo-commit on the onetrueawk repo by longtime maintainer Arnold Robbins. "Once I figure out how ... I will try to submit a pull request. I wish I understood git better, but in spite of your help, I still don't have a proper understanding, so this may take a while." Kernighan is the "K" in AWK, a special-purpose language for extracting and manipulating language that was key to Unix's pipeline features and interoperability between systems. A working awk function (AWK is the language, awk the command to invoke it) is critical to both Standard UNIX Specification and IEEE POSIX certification for interoperability. There are countless variants of awk, but "One True AWK," sometimes known as nawk, is the version based on Kernighan's 1985 book The AWK Programming Language and his subsequent input. Kernighan is also the "K" in "K&R C," the foundational 1978 book The C Programming Language he cowrote with Dennis Ritchie that sticks with programmers, mentally and in dog-eared paper form. C's roots go much deeper. Kernighan had been teaching C to workers at Bell Labs and convinced its creator, Dennis Ritchie, to collaborate on a book to spread the knowledge. That book gave birth to "the one true brace style," the endless debate that goes with it, and the structure underpinning every modern programming language. Kernighan also named Unix and first demonstrated the "Hello, world" code example.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.