A.8 Major Contributors to gawk
Always give credit where credit is due.
Anonymous
This section names the major contributors to gawk
and/or this Web page, in approximate chronological order:
- Dr. Alfred V. Aho,
Dr. Peter J. Weinberger, and
Dr. Brian W. Kernighan, all of Bell Laboratories,
designed and implemented Unix awk,
from which gawk gets the majority of its feature set.
- Paul Rubin
did the initial design and implementation in 1986, and wrote
the first draft (around 40 pages) of this Web page.
- Jay Fenlason
finished the initial implementation.
- Diane Close
revised the first draft of this Web page, bringing it
to around 90 pages.
- Richard Stallman
helped finish the implementation and the initial draft of this
Web page.
He is also the founder of the FSF and the GNU project.
- John Woods
contributed parts of the code (mostly fixes) in
the initial version of gawk.
- In 1988,
David Trueman
took over primary maintenance of gawk,
making it compatible with “new” awk, and
greatly improving its performance.
- Conrad Kwok,
Scott Garfinkle,
and
Kent Williams
did the initial ports to MS-DOS with various versions of MSC.
- Pat Rankin
provided the VMS port and its documentation.
- Hal Peterson
provided help in porting gawk to Cray systems.
(This is no longer supported.)
- Kai Uwe Rommel
provided the initial port to OS/2 and its documentation.
- Michal Jaegermann
provided the port to Atari systems and its documentation.
(This port is no longer supported.)
He continues to provide portability checking with DEC Alpha
systems, and has done a lot of work to make sure gawk
works on non-32-bit systems.
- Fred Fish
provided the port to Amiga systems and its documentation.
(With Fred's sad passing, this is no longer supported.)
- Scott Deifik
currently maintains the MS-DOS port using DJGPP.
- Eli Zaretskii
currently maintains the MS-Windows port using MinGW.
- Juan Grigera
provided a port to Windows32 systems.
(This is no longer supported.)
- For many years,
Dr. Darrel Hankerson
acted as coordinator for the various ports to different PC platforms
and created binary distributions for various PC operating systems.
He was also instrumental in keeping the documentation up to date for
the various PC platforms.
- Christos Zoulas
provided the
extension()
built-in function for dynamically adding new modules.
- Jürgen Kahrs
contributed the initial version of the TCP/IP networking
code and documentation, and motivated the inclusion of the ‘|&’ operator.
- Stephen Davies
provided the initial port to Tandem systems and its documentation.
(However, this is no longer supported.)
He was also instrumental in the initial work to integrate the
byte-code internals into the gawk code base.
- Matthew Woehlke
provided improvements for Tandem's POSIX-compliant systems.
- Martin Brown
provided the port to BeOS and its documentation.
(This is no longer supported.)
- Arno Peters
did the initial work to convert gawk to use
GNU Automake and GNU
gettext
.
- Alan J. Broder
provided the initial version of the
asort()
function
as well as the code for the optional third argument to the
match()
function.
- Andreas Buening
updated the gawk port for OS/2.
- Isamu Hasegawa,
of IBM in Japan, contributed support for multibyte characters.
- Michael Benzinger contributed the initial code for
switch
statements.
- Patrick T.J. McPhee contributed the code for dynamic loading in Windows32
environments.
(This is no longer supported)
- John Haque
reworked the gawk internals to use a byte-code engine,
providing the dgawk debugger for awk programs.
- Efraim Yawitz contributed the original text for Debugger.
- Arnold Robbins
has been working on gawk since 1988, at first
helping David Trueman, and as the primary maintainer since around 1994.