A.8 Major Contributors to gawk

Always give credit where credit is due.
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This section names the major contributors to gawk and/or this Web page, in approximate chronological order:

• Dr. Alfred V. Aho, Dr. Peter J. Weinberger, and Dr. Brian W. Kernighan, all of Bell Laboratories, designed and implemented Unix awk, from which gawk gets the majority of its feature set.
• Paul Rubin did the initial design and implementation in 1986, and wrote the first draft (around 40 pages) of this Web page.
• Jay Fenlason finished the initial implementation.
• Diane Close revised the first draft of this Web page, bringing it to around 90 pages.
• Richard Stallman helped finish the implementation and the initial draft of this Web page. He is also the founder of the FSF and the GNU project.
• John Woods contributed parts of the code (mostly fixes) in the initial version of gawk.
• In 1988, David Trueman took over primary maintenance of gawk, making it compatible with “new” awk, and greatly improving its performance.
• Conrad Kwok, Scott Garfinkle, and Kent Williams did the initial ports to MS-DOS with various versions of MSC.
• Pat Rankin provided the VMS port and its documentation.
• Hal Peterson provided help in porting gawk to Cray systems. (This is no longer supported.)
• Kai Uwe Rommel provided the initial port to OS/2 and its documentation.
• Michal Jaegermann provided the port to Atari systems and its documentation. (This port is no longer supported.) He continues to provide portability checking with DEC Alpha systems, and has done a lot of work to make sure gawk works on non-32-bit systems.
• Fred Fish provided the port to Amiga systems and its documentation. (With Fred’s sad passing, this is no longer supported.)
• Scott Deifik currently maintains the MS-DOS port using DJGPP.
• Eli Zaretskii currently maintains the MS-Windows port using MinGW.
• Juan Grigera provided a port to Windows32 systems. (This is no longer supported.)
• For many years, Dr. Darrel Hankerson acted as coordinator for the various ports to different PC platforms and created binary distributions for various PC operating systems. He was also instrumental in keeping the documentation up to date for the various PC platforms.
• Christos Zoulas provided the extension() built-in function for dynamically adding new modules.
• Jürgen Kahrs contributed the initial version of the TCP/IP networking code and documentation, and motivated the inclusion of the ‘|&’ operator.
• Stephen Davies provided the initial port to Tandem systems and its documentation. (However, this is no longer supported.) He was also instrumental in the initial work to integrate the byte-code internals into the gawk code base.
• Matthew Woehlke provided improvements for Tandem’s POSIX-compliant systems.
• Martin Brown provided the port to BeOS and its documentation. (This is no longer supported.)
• Arno Peters did the initial work to convert gawk to use GNU Automake and GNU gettext.
• Alan J. Broder provided the initial version of the asort() function as well as the code for the optional third argument to the match() function.
• Andreas Buening updated the gawk port for OS/2.
• Isamu Hasegawa, of IBM in Japan, contributed support for multibyte characters.
• Michael Benzinger contributed the initial code for switch statements.
• Patrick T.J. McPhee contributed the code for dynamic loading in Windows32 environments. (This is no longer supported)
• John Haque reworked the gawk internals to use a byte-code engine, providing the dgawk debugger for awk programs.
• Efraim Yawitz contributed the original text for dgawk: The awk Debugger.
• Arnold Robbins has been working on gawk since 1988, at first helping David Trueman, and as the primary maintainer since around 1994.