What is GNU AWK DLL?

AWK is a pattern-matching and text-processing program.
It is one of the precursors to PERL.  It has been part
of Unix for ages, so many people know how to use it.
GAWK is the GNU-"Free" version of AWK from the Free
Software Foundation.  It is essentially just like AWK,
but has some useful extensions.  GAWK has also been
ported to DOS; this is what I started with.

GAWKDLL is a port of GAWK (v2.15.2) to be a Windows DLL.
A DLL is a dynamically loadable and callable library
within Windows.  It can be called from within a compiled
program; there are examples for "C" and BASIC in the
GAWKDLL distribution.  Many other Windows applications
provide interfaces for calling DLLs using their internal
programming or macro languages.

A called DLL, GAWKDLL included, runs not as an independent
process or task, but as a subroutine of the calling program.
This saves it from the mess of spawning and waiting for
termination of a Windows subprocess.

Because of the constraints imposed on a DLL, I had to make
significant internal changes to GAWK to make it GAWKDLL.
These included stack switching, memory management and I/O.
I also added some routines which deal with INI and DBF files.

For developers who need to bind quickly a flexible pattern-
matcher and text-processor such as AWK into their programs
or macros, GAWKDLL is just the thing.

Find it on http://www.walkerj.de

Jim Walker