[bug-gawk] Beta release of gawk 5.0.0 now available

[Arnold Robbins]

This note is to announce the BETA release of GNU Awk 5.0.0.

It is available from:

        http://www.skeeve.com/gawk/gawk-4.2.64.tar.gz

This is a major release, with significant new features.
The important part of the NEWS file is below.

As far as I can tell, the documentation and code have both hit the
freeze point.

So, why do a beta release? So that you, yes you, the end user, can see
if anything I've done breaks gawk for you.  Then you can TELL ME ABOUT
IT so that I can fix it for the final release.

Thanks,

Arnold Robbins
address@hidden
---------------------------------------------
   Copyright (C) 2019, 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.

Changes from 4.2.1 to 5.0.0
---------------------------

1. Support for the POSIX standard %a and %A printf formats has been added.

2. The test infrastructure has been greatly improved, simplifying the
   contents of test/Makefile.am and making it possible to generate
   pc/Makefile.tst from test/Makefile.in.

3. The regex routines have been replaced with those from GNULIB, allowing
   me to stop carrying forward decades of changes against the original
   ones from GLIBC.

4. Infrastructure upgrades: Bison 3.3, Automake 1.16.1, Gettext 0.19.8.1,
   makeinfo 6.5.

5. The undocumented configure option and code that enabled the use of
   non-English "letters" in identifiers is now gone.

6. The `--with-whiny-user-strftime' configuration option is now gone.

7. The code now makes some stronger assumptions about a C99 environment.

8. PROCINFO["platform"] yields a string indicating the platform for
   which gawk was compiled.

9. Writing to elements of SYMTAB that are not variable names now
   causes a fatal error. THIS CHANGES BEHAVIOR.

10. Comment handling in the pretty-printer has been reworked almost completely
    from scratch. As a result, comments in many corner cases that were
    previously lost are now included in the formatted output.

11. Namespaces have been implemented! See the manual.  One consequence of this
    is that files included with -i, read with -f, and command line program
    segments must all be self-contained syntactic units. E.g., you can no
    longer do something like this:

        gawk -e 'BEGIN {' -e 'print "hello" }'

12. A number of bugs, some of them quite significant, have been fixed.
    See the ChangeLog for details.