Re: [bug-gawk] Invalid result when converting to hex literal

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Thanks, Arnold, for the explanation of awk's conversion of the token
12345foolish as a numeric value, 12345, followed by the string value
of the variable foolish; I had expected that whitespace would have
been required in the concatenation operation, but it appears not to be
the case.  I use concatenation a lot in my own awk programming, but
always with intervening space.

Should you decide to add support for the %a format in gawk, you are
correct to be concerned about possible lack of support for accurate
base conversions in older C libraries.

A solution for IEEE 754 systems (and thus, not applicable to VAX VMS,
or IBM S/390 and zSeries mainframes) are the conversion routines
written by the well-known numerical analyst David M. Gay, available at

        http://www.netlib.org/fp/

They have been tested on many different systems and carry license
statements that I believe should be acceptable for inclusion in GNU
software.

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