gawk bug

[John H. DuBois III]

$ time gawk 'BEGIN{j=1; j^=-1; print j}'
1

real    0m9.62s
user    0m9.60s
sys     0m0.01s

$ time gawk 'BEGIN{j=1; j=j^-1; print j}'
1

real    0m0.00s
user    0m0.00s
sys     0m0.00s

Note the large amount of cpu time consumed in the ^= case.  These numbers are
from gawk-3.1.4k built with gcc 2.95.3 under SCO OpenServer 5.0.6a on a Xeon
system.  Similar results occur with all versions of gawk back through at least
2.15.  Similar results also obtained with gawk 3.1.3 and 3.1.4k built with gcc
3.3.5 under Gentoo Linux on a Pentium III.

        John
-- 
John DuBois  address@hidden  KC6QKZ/AE  http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/