awkcc

awkcc is an awk-to-C transcompiler. It was originally implemented by Chris Ramming, then at Bell Labs, circa 1988.

The intent of this repo is to make the source code of awkcc public for historical purposes. This code is not being further developed or maintained.

Repo structure

The repo contains two snapshots of the source code in the 1988 and 2011 folders. Both snapshots contain the complete codebase of awkcc at the given time. The codebase includes the original documentation. Much thanks to Arnold Robbins for his help in recovering these snapshots. Thanks to Jeff Paranich for the build instructions.

Build Instructions

These instructions apply to the 2011 version of the code.

Requirements

Yacc is required to build. On a Debian-derived system with apt, install it with apt install bison.

Compilation

Build in Linux

Build: make awkcc TYPE=darwin CC=gcc

Clean: make force

Build in MinGW (MSys)

Build: make awkcc TYPE=cygwin CC=gcc CFLAGS="-D__CYGWIN__ -DWIN_NUL_DEV"

Clean: make force

It is neccessary to define CYGWIN or else the compiler will compile a different implementation of the function awkerr in awkerr.c, which relies on _doprnt, which is non-portable (no POSIX, no ANSI/ISO C).

See the Makefile for other build type parameters (solaris, hppa).

After building, make will create three files worth noting:

• The executable 'awkcc' in awkcc20/awkcc
• The script 'awkcc.sh' in awkcc20/awkcc
• The library 'libAWK.a' in awkcc20/lib

You will need to edit awkcc.sh HEADERDIR and AWKLIB variables (at the top of the script) to where you ultimately install libAWK.a and the header files on your system. You only need to install the headers in ./include ({awk,dollars,ear,hash,header,specassign,y.tab}.h)

Usage

awkcc -o nwc -c nwc.c nwc.awk

awkcc will automatically call awkcc.sh, a shell script for compiling the resulting .c file. It may require hand-tuning based on your include and library paths, but is pretty straightforward.

Alternatively if want to compile the generated .c manually you can do so with:

gcc -I../include -o nwc nwc.c libAWK.a -lm

Note the order of statements matter; libAWK.a must come after *.c.

Minor Changes to Original Bell Labs Source

These minor changes enable the code to compile on certain systems.

[Added to awkrun.c]

To allow execution in Windows through MinGW, it is neccessary to specify an alternative to /dev/null:

#ifdef WIN_NUL_DEV
in = fopen("nul", "r");
if (in == NULL)
	fprintf(stderr, "cannot open nul for reading.\n");
#else
in = fopen("/dev/null", "r");
if (in == NULL)
	fprintf(stderr, "cannot open /dev/null for reading.\n");	
#endif

[Changed in main.c]

Nodep yyparse();
 -to-
int yyparse();

License

awkcc is licensed under the BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License.