AnonymousFox

//usr/share/doc/gawk-3.1.7/FUTURES

Copyright (C) 2005, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  
  Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
  are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
  notice and this notice are preserved.

This file lists future projects and enhancements for gawk.  Items are listed
in roughly the order they will be done for a given release.  This file is
mainly for use by the developers to help keep themselves on track, please
don't bug us too much about schedules or what all this really means.

With the 3.0 release, we are acknowledging that awk is not PERL, nor should
it become PERL.  (To paraphrase Dennis Ritchie, "If you want PERL, you
know where to get it.")

The focus on the future is thus narrowed to performance and functional
enhancements, with only minor plans for significant new features.

(OK, so 3.1 had a bad case of feature-itis.  I think I'm mostly over it
now, though. :-)

In 3.1
======
	DONE: A PROCINFO array to replace /dev/pid, /dev/user, et al.

DONE: Provide awk profiling.

DONE: Integrate GNU NLS support.

DONE: Bring out hooks for NLS support into gawk itself.

DONE: Do a reference card.

DONE: Switch to full ANSI C and use ansi2kr.

Additional manual features:
		DONE: Document NLS support

DONE: Add %'d for putting in commas in formatting.

DONE: Multibyte support for index, length, substr, match.

For 3.2
=======
	Enable \s, \S in regexes (regcomp.c and dfa.c) and document them.

Make POSIX 2001 behavior the default for sub/gsub.

Add IPv6 support.

Add an optional base to strtonum, allowing 2-36.

Simplify awk.h.

Consider moving var_value info into Node_var itself
	to reduce memory usage.

Look at ISO C 99 printf features.

Consider integrating Fred Fish's DBUG library into gawk.

Move the loadable modules interface to libtool.

Redo the loadable modules interface from the awk level.

Rework management of array index storage. (Partially DONE.)

A RECLEN variable for fixed-length record input. PROCINFO["RS"]
	would be "RS" or "RECLEN" depending upon what's in use.

Use a new or improved dfa and/or regex library.

DBM storage of awk arrays. Try to allow multiple dbm packages.

Consider removing use of and/or need for the protos.h file.

Additional manual features:
		? Add exercises
		Document use of dbm arrays
		? Add an error messages section to the manual

For 3.3
=======
	? Have strftime() pay attention to the value of ENVIRON["TZ"]

Add a lint check if the return value of a function is used but
	the function did not supply a value.

Additional manual features:
		? A section on where gawk is bounded
			regex
			i/o
			sun fp conversions

For 3.4
=======
	Do an optimization pass over parse tree?

Make 	awk '/foo/' files...	run at egrep speeds (how?)

For 4.x:
========

Provide awk debugging.