Re: "prints a surprising 1" cannot be reproduced

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Arkadiusz Drabczyk <arkadiusz@drabczyk.org> reports:

>> in gawktexi.in it says
>> 
>> "the following (extreme) pipeline prints a surprising @samp{1}:
>> 
>> @example
>> $ @kbd{echo | gawk --posix 'BEGIN @{ RS = "a" @} ; @{ print NF @}'}
>> @print{} 1
>> @end example
>> "
>> 
>> But I cannot reproduce it with gawk built from today's master branch:
>> 
>> $ echo | ./gawk --posix 'BEGIN { RS = "a" } ; { print NF}'
>> 0

Here is where things changed:

foreach f ($B/gawk*)
    echo ============= $f:t
    echo | $f --posix 'BEGIN { RS = "a" } ; { print NF}'
end
============= gawk-4.1.1b
1
============= gawk-4.1.1c
1
============= gawk-4.1.1d
1
============= gawk-4.1.2
1
============= gawk-4.1.3
1
============= gawk-4.1.3g
1
============= gawk-4.1.3h
1
============= gawk-4.1.4
1
============= gawk-4.1.60
0
============= gawk-4.1.61
0
============= gawk-4.1.62
0
============= gawk-4.1.63
0
============= gawk-4.1.65
0
============= gawk-4.2.0
0
============= gawk-4.2.1
0
============= gawk-4.2.1a
0
============= gawk-4.2.60
0
============= gawk-4.2.61
0
============= gawk-4.2.64
0
============= gawk-5.0.61
0
============= gawk-5.0.63
0
============= gawk-5.0.65
0
============= gawk-5.1.0
0

I can go back many more versions on an older machine, but the above
experiment shows that a change between gawk-4.1.4 and gawk-4.1.60
is the culprit.

The question for the chief architect is now: which is the desired
behavior: the manual's specification, or the code's implementation?

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
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