Re: Fwd: gawk: numeric comparison on 'sub()' resulted ${n} vars does not work properly

[Stephen Dowdy]

On 2/8/20 12:15 PM, Stephen Dowdy wrote:

> Am i still missing something?   Does the man page require correction?

Duh, yes, i'm still missing something (failing to read the next paragraph in 
the man page, sorry about that...

       Note that string constants, such as "57", are not numeric strings, they 
are string constants.  The idea of “numeric string” only applies to fields, getline 
input, FILENAME, ARGV elements, ENVIRON elements and the elements of an array created by 
split()
       or patsplit() that are numeric strings.  The basic idea is that user 
input, and only user input, that looks numeric, should be treated that way.

so, that's still a little iffy for me, as it WAS user input as $1, and 'sub' is 
replacing $1 -- but i'd argue that it shouldn't be considered a 'string 
constant', as it was the result of a string substitution. (somewhat similar to 
the {pat,}split operations.)

Anyway, i'll give up now.  I definitely got a bit off-track by working in both 
mawk/gawk worlds and conflating some of the manpage entries (mawk has no 
clarification like the above).

> thanks,
> --stephen