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Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

Im bookmarking that. Reason is David Wheeler and I's discussion of countering compiler subversion. Need to bootstrap the C compiler with something trustworthy & local. I looked into Perl since it's industrial strength and widely deployed. He mentioned bash since most (all?) UNIX's had it. My next thought was converting a small, non-optimizing compiler's source to bash or awk. So crazy it might work.

Now, you've posted a compiler/interpreter in awk for a C-like language that could allow easier porting of a C compiler's source. Hmmm. The license would have to be BSD so the BSD's could use it, too. Or pieces of it in my own solution.

I have a feeling whatever comes out of this won't make it into next edition of Beautiful Code. ;)

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Now I look at it I see that it's not open source --- I'll add a cover note saying it's actually BSD.

Let me also say that if you actually want to use this for anything you're crazy. I wrote it when I was... younger... and when I had no idea what I was doing. The only thing it's useful for these days is looking at and laughing at.

I figure it might give me ideas for how to express some compiler concepts in awk. What I planto do is most brain-dead, simple implementation that's possible so anyone can understand & vet it.

Almost relevant: I wrote a parser generator in and for awk (called 'yawk' even though it did LL(1) instead of LR grammars), even older than this. But at some point I lost it, and it was never released online.

Which do you think would be better in terms of coming with all major distros and easiest to write compiler in: awk or bash? Ive forgotten both due to injury so cant tell without lots of experimenting.

I've never done any serious programming with bash, just simple Bourne shell scripts, because I don't want to think about all the escaping rules and such. I did write some programs in Awk in the 90s (notably https://github.com/darius/awklisp), so I'd go with that. Maybe someone who's bent bash to their will could speak up here?

AFAIK they're both ubiquitous, though you might need a particular awk like gawk for library functions, depending on what you need to do. Nowadays I'm way more likely to use Python, though of course it's a much bigger dependency.

Sorry about the injury, and good luck -- I'd like to hear how it goes.

The escaping in Bash can be a pain. I was recently writing an execution wrapper in Bash, and needed to send the results via JSON. Fighting with the quotes was almost enough to make me throw in the towel and move to a language with a builtin JSON parser, but I ran across this technique, of embedding a heredoc to preserve quotes in a variable. https://gist.github.com/kdabir/9c086970e0b1a53c3df491b20fcb0... It 'simplified' things and kept them readable.

Thanks for sharing awklisp. Nice reading for a Sunday morning.

I'm glad you enjoyed that, thanks. :)

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