awk (or better gawk) libraries of math functions

[pier4r]

Follow up of http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-10132.html .

Since gawk 4.1 (debian 8 has it, so it was included relatively recently in the main linux distributions) gawk has also arbitrary precision arithmetic like bc, plus a couple of construct more than bc. The syntax is pretty easy to pick up (it is like C), so it is a nice programming environment (although not that optimized of course).

As another confirmation that internet forgets, in the past there were more than one site hosting awk communities that collected plenty of contributions. One was awk.info or the like. Of those sites there are some parts, but only few, on the internet wayback machine.

Therefore a lot of potential contributions got lost. The best I could find that is available nowadays with a quick search is this nice wiki http://balbach.net/awk/doku.php?id=start .
(I note that although communities may be active, wikis may be lacking most of the contributions, like our wiki at http://www.wiki4hp.com . That's a pity)

Checking quickly the libraries there I found this:
https://github.com/numcommand/num/tree/master/src
That's quite a work.

I think the libraries developed for bc should be larger than those for awk and they could provide a base for a possible port.