the awk of the past?

I wrote a few hundred words about awk and realised that I had re-invented an idea from Rob Pike's Structural Regular Expressions paper.

Structural Regular Expressions

There's a section titled "The awk of the future?" where he imagines a version of awk that, instead of being line oriented, lets you define the structure of the document using regular expressions (which is the overall point of structural regexps).

It also supports backrefrences and nested rules.

This paper was written in 1987, it's two years older than me. My question is, where is my awk of the future? Where even is my awk of the past?

Plan 9 seemed like a likely place for this to exist. I haven't tried awk from Plan 9, but I looked at the man page and didn't see anything that looked futuristic. Just a plain POSIX-y version of awk.

Has anyone put these ideas in practise? Did they work? Did they fail? I'm worried that I'll have to write my own awk to answer these questions.

gate

2020-08-25