gawk-5.4.0

[Bruce Dubbs]

New minor version.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Changes from 5.3.x to 5.4.0

1. This release now uses Mike Haertel's MinRX regular expression matcher
   as the default regexp engine. The old regex and dfa engines are still
   available. More detail is available in the manual, and in the file
   README_d/README.matchers. At the very least, read that file!

2. The manual, in the Bugs section, now makes it explicit that
   (a) Ad hominem attacks on the lists will not be tolerated, and
   (b) Discussion of proprietary software is strongly discouraged.
   Repeated offenses are grounds for being banned from the lists.

3. There is now a new directive, @nsinclude, which works like @include
   but does not reset the namespace for the included file to "awk". See
   the manual for details.

4. When using lshift() or rshift() and attempting to shift by as many
   or more bits than in a uintmax_t, gawk returns zero, instead of
   whatever the C compiler and hardware might have done.

5. Gawk's use of persistent memory has changed somewhat:
   A. Gawk now stores additional meta-information in the backing file.
      This means that if you have a backing file with important data
      in it, you should dump the data to a text file using the old version,
      create a new backing file, and then read your data back in with
      the new version, to a *brand new* backing file.
   B. Gawk generates a warning if the version of gawk saved in the backing
      file doesn't match that of the current running gawk.
   C. It's now possible to use persistent memory and dynamic extensions
      without problems. Gawk notices if an extension is being loaded from
      a different path than what was first used and produces a fatal error
      in this case.

6. The ordchr extension now supports multibyte / wide characters.

7. Per the 2024 POSIX standard, `length(array)' is no longer an extension,
   but a regular feature.  Thus --posix no longer rejects it and --lint
   no longer warns about it.

8. The --traditional option has been rationalized to bring gawk into
   sync with BWK awk. It no longer affects the return code from system(),
   and it no longer prevents using a regexp for RS. Internally, the
   code was cleaned up some as well.

9. Assertions in the C code are now enabled.  To disable them, manually
   edit the various Makefiles after running configure and before
   running make. You will need to add -DNDEBUG to the CFLAGS variable.

10. PMA should now work on OpenBSD 7, FreeBSD 12 - 16, NetBSD 10 and 11,
    and MidnightBSD 3 and 4.

11. Hexadecimal floating-point values may now be used in program source code,
    with strtonum(), and with the -n/--non-decimal-data option.  See the
    manual for details.

12. A large number of small "replacement" files for standard functions
    have been removed. These functions are now so standard that we
    simply expect them to always be available. This simplifies the
    distribution and the code maintenance.

13. Support for UDP in gawk's networking support is now obsolete.
    It never worked very well. It will be removed in version 6.0.
    Gawk issues a warning when attempting to use it.

14. Reading regular disk input files should be somewhat faster now,
    since gawk no longer checks for timeouts on such files.  On one
    very large file, gawk '{ print }' saw approximately a 9% speedup.

15. The MinGW port of gawk for MS-Windows now supports UTF-8 encoded
    non-ASCII text when the console window where gawk runs uses the
    Windows codepage 65001 for output, even if the system-wide locale
    specifies another codepage.

    Similarly, the Cygwin port now also fully supports UTF-8.

16. There is a new option to configure: --enable-O3.  This causes gcc to
    use -O3 instead of -O2 when compiling gawk.  This is not the default
    because experience in some projects has shown (sadly) that -O3 can cause
    bugs.

17. There is a new translation: Arabic. The .gmo files for the ca, da, fi,
    ja, ka, ms, and vi translations are no longer built or included in
    the distribution, as those translations have gone too long without
    being updated.  The .po files remain in the distribution, should
    any volunteers wish to come forward to update them.

18. OpenVMS support has been updated. This release builds on
    Alpha, Itanium and x86_64.

19. As usual, a number of small bugs have been fixed; see the ChangeLog
    for the details.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at commit 0be125fdfc.