Statements as functions?

[Jim Mellander]

I found a case where I would kinda like to execute a statement as a
function, kinda like some other languages (lua, e.g.) do.

Here's a fragment from a script that processes thttpd logs and creates a
count of unique IPs per day hitting a webserver, excluding spiders:

# Print date & IP if different from previous line of input
#                                                    date " " ip
! ($1 in spider) && ((l = substr($4,2,11) " " $1) != lastline) {
        print lastline = l
}

What would be nice (not essential by any means) would be to be able to code
it all in the pattern section, like this:

! ($1 in spider) && ((l = substr($4,2,11) " " $1) != lastline && print
lastline = l) { }

print could return the count of characters printed. Similarly, a for loop
could return the number of iterations. Obviously, a counter in the for loop
could serve the same purpose, and a helper function to print can be used in
my case (but not in the general case).

So, this isn't really a feature request, but kind of a nice to have...

My first post to the list, been using awk for decades...