Re: [bug-gawk] Adding an API hook to enable a select extension

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 30 May 2013 21:12:14 -0400
> From: "Andrew J. Schorr" <address@hidden>
> 
> At the risk of making Brian Kernighan throw up, since he believes no awk
> program should be longer than 2 lines, I propose the attached patch to the 
> API.
> I could be mistaken, but I think this should be enough to implement a select
> extension.  If the name argument is NULL, it would return &curfile.public.
> Otherwise, it would return &getredirect(name, strlen(name))->iop->public.  We
> might want to replace the red_head array with a hash table to optimize the
> performance of getredirect.
> 
> User code might look something like this:

Is it really a good idea to leak such low-level details to Gawk
program level?  Can't we come up with some higher-level abstraction
for this, like conceal the entire while(1) loop in Gawk internals, and
present just some operator or function(s) on the Gawk script level?