Re: Make awk more friendly to multiline function declaration

[Peng Yu]

Many other programming languages don't have this problem of being
unable to allow arbitrary positions of commas in function declaration
without the backslash.

Is that a big deal to add this support in awk?

On Mon, Mar 28, 2022 at 9:45 PM Neil R. Ormos
<ormos-gnulists17@ormos.org> wrote:
>
> Peng Yu wrote:
>
> >> The comma mover could be run manually or as a
> >> preprocessor.  The Gawk manual describes a
> >> preprocessor for include directives which
> >> could be modified to add the comma moving
> >> feature.
>
> > Wouldn't this be context-sensitive (as mentioned
> > by Wolfgang Laun)?  Could you show an example of
> > how to preprocess the code so that commas in
> > paratheses can be moved to the previous lines
> > robustly? I don't see an easy way to make this
> > robust. For example, you could have some legal
> > awk code in a string, then the preprocessor
> > needs know to what is a string so that it will
> > not make the change.
>
> Yes, it would be context-sensitive.
>
> The point was that the context-sensitive elements
> could be in a user-written program, rather than in
> the Gawk interpreter, freeing the implementors of
> Gawk from the consequences Wolfgang Laun
> described.
>
> In that case, the comma-mover code need only be as
> generalized, robust, and concomitantly complex, as
> is required to accommodate the particular user's
> coding style.
>


-- 
Regards,
Peng