Programs in awk consist of pattern/action pairs. Each pattern is a regular expression, a concept we'll describe in detail in Chapter9. When an awk program is run, it steps through each line of the input file. Each line is checked against every pattern/action pair in order. If the pattern matches the line, the associated action is performed.

Each action is coded in a language resembling a subset of C, with variables and conditionals and loops and an ontology of types including integers, strings, and (unlike C) dictionaries.^[89]

The awk action language is Turing-complete, and can read and write files. In some versions it can open and use network sockets. But awk has primarily seen use as a report generator, especially for interpreting and reducing tabular data. It is seldom used standalone, but rather embedded in scripts. There is an example awk program in the case study on HTML generation included in Chapter9.

A case study of awk is included to point out that it is not a model for emulation; in fact, since 1990 it has largely fallen out of use. It has been superseded by new-school scripting languages—notably Perl, which was explicitly designed to be an awk killer. The reasons are worthy of examination, because they constitute a bit of a cautionary tale for minilanguage designers.

The awk language was originally designed to be a small, expressive special-purpose language for report generation. Unfortunately, it turns out to have been designed at a bad spot on the complexity-vs.-power curve. The action language is noncompact, but the pattern-driven framework it sits inside keeps it from being generally applicable — that's the worst of both worlds. And the new-school scripting languages can do anything awk can; their equivalent programs are usually just as readable, if not more so.

For a few years after the release of Perl in 1987, awk remained competitive simply because it had a smaller, faster implementation. But as the cost of compute cycles and memory dropped, the economic reasons for favoring a special-purpose language that was relatively thrifty with both lost their force. Programmers increasingly chose to do awklike things with Perl or (later) Python, rather than keep two different scripting languages in their heads.^[90] By the year 2000 awk had become little more than a memory for most old-school Unix hackers, and not a particularly nostalgic one.

Falling costs have changed the tradeoffs in minilanguage design. Restricting your design's capabilities to buy compactness may still be a good idea, but doing so to economize on machine resources is a bad one. Machine resources get cheaper over time, but space in programmers' heads only gets more expensive. Modern minilanguages can either be general but noncompact, or specialized but very compact; specialized but noncompact simply won't compete.