File: gawk.info,  Node: Manual History,  Next: How To Contribute,  Prev: Conventions,  Up: Preface

The GNU Project and This Book
=============================

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit organization dedicated
to the production and distribution of freely distributable software.  It
was founded by Richard M. Stallman, the author of the original Emacs
editor.  GNU Emacs is the most widely used version of Emacs today.

   The GNU(1) Project is an ongoing effort on the part of the Free
Software Foundation to create a complete, freely distributable,
POSIX-compliant computing environment.  The FSF uses the GNU General
Public License (GPL) to ensure that its software's source code is always
available to the end user.  A copy of the GPL is included for your
reference (*note Copying::).  The GPL applies to the C language source
code for 'gawk'.  To find out more about the FSF and the GNU Project
online, see the GNU Project's home page (https://www.gnu.org).  This
Info file may also be read from GNU's website
(https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/).

   A shell, an editor (Emacs), highly portable optimizing C, C++, and
Objective-C compilers, a symbolic debugger and dozens of large and small
utilities (such as 'gawk'), have all been completed and are freely
available.  The GNU operating system kernel (the HURD), has been
released but remains in an early stage of development.

   Until the GNU operating system is more fully developed, you should
consider using GNU/Linux, a freely distributable, Unix-like operating
system for Intel, Power Architecture, Sun SPARC, IBM S/390, and other
systems.(2)  Many GNU/Linux distributions are available for download
from the Internet.

   The Info file itself has gone through multiple previous editions.
Paul Rubin wrote the very first draft of 'The GAWK Manual'; it was
around 40 pages long.  Diane Close and Richard Stallman improved it,
yielding a version that was around 90 pages and barely described the
original, "old" version of 'awk'.

   I started working with that version in the fall of 1988.  As work on
it progressed, the FSF published several preliminary versions (numbered
0.X).  In 1996, edition 1.0 was released with 'gawk' 3.0.0.  The FSF
published the first two editions under the title 'The GNU Awk User's
Guide'.

   This edition maintains the basic structure of the previous editions.
For FSF edition 4.0, the content was thoroughly reviewed and updated.
All references to 'gawk' versions prior to 4.0 were removed.  Of
significant note for that edition was the addition of *note Debugger::.

   For FSF edition 5.0, the content has been reorganized into parts, and
the major new additions are *note Arbitrary Precision Arithmetic::, and
*note Dynamic Extensions::.

   This Info file will undoubtedly continue to evolve.  If you find an
error in the Info file, please report it!  *Note Bugs:: for information
on submitting problem reports electronically.

   ---------- Footnotes ----------

   (1) GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix."

   (2) The terminology "GNU/Linux" is explained in the *note Glossary::.