> Jon Bentley found two pearls in GAWK: its regular expressions and its associative arrays.
When I encountered AWK I was amazed by associative arrays. It was the first language I've seen where associative array were so accessible. Then there was PHP (I think arrays are one of the things that strongly contribute to its popularity).
Today pretty much every commonly used language has this feature. Often it seems more mimicry that actual appreciation of this data structure. For example when other languages creators bring this structure in they tend to forget about important feature. Ordering. For example python didn't have standard ordered dictionary type for a long time. Also ruby keeps order of the items in hash only since 1.9
When I encountered AWK I was amazed by associative arrays. It was the first language I've seen where associative array were so accessible. Then there was PHP (I think arrays are one of the things that strongly contribute to its popularity).
Today pretty much every commonly used language has this feature. Often it seems more mimicry that actual appreciation of this data structure. For example when other languages creators bring this structure in they tend to forget about important feature. Ordering. For example python didn't have standard ordered dictionary type for a long time. Also ruby keeps order of the items in hash only since 1.9