File: gawk.info,  Node: Contributors,  Next: History summary,  Prev: Ranges and Locales,  Up: Language History

A.9 Major Contributors to 'gawk'
================================

     Always give credit where credit is due.
                            -- _Anonymous_

   This minor node names the major contributors to 'gawk' and/or this
Info file, in approximate chronological order:

   * Dr. Alfred V. Aho, Dr. Peter J. Weinberger, and Dr. Brian W.
     Kernighan, all of Bell Laboratories, designed and implemented Unix
     'awk', from which 'gawk' gets the majority of its feature set.

   * Paul Rubin did the initial design and implementation in 1986, and
     wrote the first draft (around 40 pages) of this Info file.

   * Jay Fenlason finished the initial implementation.

   * Diane Close revised the first draft of this Info file, bringing it
     to around 90 pages.

   * Richard Stallman helped finish the implementation and the initial
     draft of this Info file.  He is also the founder of the FSF and the
     GNU Project.

   * John Woods contributed parts of the code (mostly fixes) in the
     initial version of 'gawk'.

   * In 1988, David Trueman took over primary maintenance of 'gawk',
     making it compatible with "new" 'awk', and greatly improving its
     performance.

   * Conrad Kwok, Scott Garfinkle, and Kent Williams did the initial
     ports to MS-DOS with various versions of MSC.

   * Pat Rankin provided the VMS port and its documentation.

   * Hal Peterson provided help in porting 'gawk' to Cray systems.
     (This is no longer supported.)

   * Kai Uwe Rommel provided the initial port to OS/2 and its
     documentation.

   * Michal Jaegermann provided the port to Atari systems and its
     documentation.  (This port is no longer supported.)  He continues
     to provide portability checking, and has done a lot of work to make
     sure 'gawk' works on non-32-bit systems.

   * Fred Fish provided the port to Amiga systems and its documentation.
     (With Fred's sad passing, this is no longer supported.)

   * Scott Deifik formerly maintained the MS-DOS port using DJGPP.

   * Eli Zaretskii currently maintains the MS-Windows port using MinGW.

   * Juan Grigera provided a port to Windows32 systems.  (This is no
     longer supported.)

   * For many years, Dr. Darrel Hankerson acted as coordinator for the
     various ports to different PC platforms and created binary
     distributions for various PC operating systems.  He was also
     instrumental in keeping the documentation up to date for the
     various PC platforms.

   * Christos Zoulas provided the 'extension()' built-in function for
     dynamically adding new functions.  (This was obsoleted at 'gawk'
     4.1.)

   * Jürgen Kahrs contributed the initial version of the TCP/IP
     networking code and documentation, and motivated the inclusion of
     the '|&' operator.

   * Stephen Davies provided the initial port to Tandem systems and its
     documentation.  (However, this is no longer supported.)  He was
     also instrumental in the initial work to integrate the byte-code
     internals into the 'gawk' code base.  Additionally, he did most of
     the work enabling the pretty-printer to preserve and output
     comments.

   * Matthew Woehlke provided improvements for Tandem's POSIX-compliant
     systems.

   * Martin Brown provided the port to BeOS and its documentation.
     (This is no longer supported.)

   * Arno Peters did the initial work to convert 'gawk' to use GNU
     Automake and GNU 'gettext'.

   * Alan J. Broder provided the initial version of the 'asort()'
     function as well as the code for the optional third argument to the
     'match()' function.

   * Andreas Buening updated the 'gawk' port for OS/2.

   * Isamu Hasegawa, of IBM in Japan, contributed support for multibyte
     characters.

   * Michael Benzinger contributed the initial code for 'switch'
     statements.

   * Patrick T.J. McPhee contributed the code for dynamic loading in
     Windows32 environments.  (This is no longer supported.)

   * Anders Wallin helped keep the VMS port going for several years.

   * Assaf Gordon contributed the initial code to implement the
     '--sandbox' option.

   * John Haque made the following contributions:

        - The modifications to convert 'gawk' into a byte-code
          interpreter, including the debugger

        - The addition of true arrays of arrays

        - The additional modifications for support of
          arbitrary-precision arithmetic

        - The initial text of *note Arbitrary Precision Arithmetic::

        - The work to merge the three versions of 'gawk' into one, for
          the 4.1 release

        - Improved array internals for arrays indexed by integers

        - The improved array sorting features were also driven by John,
          together with Pat Rankin

   * Panos Papadopoulos contributed the original text for *note Include
     Files::.

   * Efraim Yawitz contributed the original text for *note Debugger::.

   * The development of the extension API first released with 'gawk' 4.1
     was driven primarily by Arnold Robbins and Andrew Schorr, with
     notable contributions from the rest of the development team.

   * John Malmberg contributed significant improvements to the OpenVMS
     port and the related documentation.

   * Antonio Giovanni Colombo rewrote a number of examples in the early
     chapters that were severely dated, for which I am incredibly
     grateful.  He also provided and maintains the Italian translation.

   * Marco Curreli, together with Antonio Colombo, translated this Info
     file into Italian.  It is included in the 'gawk' distribution.

   * Juan Manuel Guerrero took over maintenance of the DJGPP port.

   * "Jannick" provided support for MSYS2.

   * Arnold Robbins has been working on 'gawk' since 1988, at first
     helping David Trueman, and as the primary maintainer since around
     1994.