Re: [bug-gawk] Access variables not conforming to the variable naming convention?

[arnold]

Peng Yu <address@hidden> wrote:

> > > please don't do that about SYMTAB :)
> >
> > Why not? Please give a good reason.
>
> A specific example that I have is to parse a headed TSV file and refer
> to columns by header names (all of these preprocessing are loaded as
> premade awk files, so users don't need to know $1 $2 any more to refer
> to columns). Without SYMTAB, it is impossible to do so.

I was not clear about my intent.  The following continues to work
as intended:

        $ ./gawk 'BEGIN { foo = 5
        > SYMTAB["foo"] += 37
        > print foo }'
        42

Whereas this no longer works as it did previously:

        $ ./gawk 'BEGIN { foo = 5
        > SYMTAB["the answer"] = 42
        > print SYMTAB["the answer"] }'
        gawk: cmd. line:2: fatal: cannot assign to arbitrary elements of SYMTAB

So existing code that used SYMTAB to update a variable will continue
to work.

Thanks,

Arnold