A Princeton professor, discovering a little bit time for himself in the summertime educational lull, emailed an previous buddy a pair months in the past. Brian Kernighan mentioned howdy, requested how their US go to was going, and dropped off tons of of strains of code that might add Unicode help for AWK, the text-parsing software he helped create for Unix at Bell Labs in 1977.

“I’ve examined this a good quantity however clearly extra assessments are wanted,” Kernighan wrote within the e mail, posted in late May as a type of pseudo-commit on the onetrueawk repo by longtime maintainer Arnold Robbins. “Once I determine how … I’ll attempt to submit a pull request. I want I understood git higher, however despite your assist, I nonetheless haven’t got a correct understanding, so this may occasionally take some time.”

Kernighan is the “Ok” in AWK, a special-purpose language for extracting and manipulating language that was key to Unix’s pipeline options and interoperability between programs. A working awk perform (AWK is the language, awk the command to invoke it) is important to each Standard UNIX Specification and IEEE POSIX certification for interoperability. There are numerous variants of awk—together with trendy derivations with help for Unicode—however “One True AWK,” generally generally known as nawk, is a type of canonical model based mostly on Kernighan’s 1985 e-book The AWK Programming Language and his subsequent enter.

Kernighan can also be the “Ok” in “Ok&R C,” the foundational 1978 e-book The C Programming Language he cowrote with Dennis Ritchie that sticks with programmers, mentally and in dog-eared paper kind. C’s roots go a lot deeper. Kernighan had been instructing C to employees at Bell Labs and satisfied its creator, Ritchie, to collaborate on a e-book to unfold the data. That e-book gave delivery to “the one true brace model,” the limitless debate that goes with it, and the construction underpinning each trendy programming language.

Kernighan additionally named Unix and first demonstrated the “Hello, world” code instance. He spoke with Ars Technica’s Richard Jensen for a fiftieth anniversary historical past of Unix.

The onetrueawk repository, the place Kernighan appeared in late May, is a comparatively quiet place, with 21 contributors, 46 GitHub customers watching, and commits coming each few months. As famous by The Register, Kernighan’s Unicode repair got here to mild principally as a result of it was talked about in an interview with the professor by YouTube channel Computerphile.

“It’s at all times been a humiliation that AWK solely labored with ASCII, or possibly 8-bit inputs, however it does not actually deal with Unicode in any respect,” Kernighan tells interviewer professor David Brailsford. “A couple of months in the past, I spent a while working with (laughs) an extremely previous program. I’ve it at this level the place it’s going to really deal with UTF-8 enter and output as a way to have common expressions that, you already know, decide up Japanese characters, issues like that.”

Kernighan, now 80, offhandedly mentions within the interview that he has additionally patched one thing “fast and soiled” to let AWK deal with CSV recordsdata.