Re: [bug-gawk] fatal: cannot assign to arbitrary elements of SYMTAB

[Peng Yu]

I think that disabling the ability to assign a new key to SYMTAB is not a
bad change (just keeping ops like += is not sufficient). It makes the code
that used to work not working anymore (see the example in the following
link). You have to use SYMTAB to support an arbitrary TSV header.
Therefore, I strongly suggest changing gawk to its original behavior.

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gawk/2018-12/msg00007.html

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 6:06 PM Neil R. Ormos <address@hidden>
wrote:

> Peng Yu wrote:
>
> > The following command used to work. But it stops working in "GNU Awk
> > 5.0.0, API: 2.0 (GNU MPFR 4.0.2, GNU MP 6.1.2)".
>
> > $ awk -e 'BEGIN { SYMTAB["foo"] = "1"; print SYMTAB["foo"] }'
> > awk: cmd. line:1: fatal: cannot assign to arbitrary elements of SYMTAB
>
> > Is there anything that can be done to get the original behavior? Thanks.
>
> Attention is respectfully drawn to this message and the
> thread of which it is a part:
>
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gawk/2018-12/msg00010.html
>
> --
Regards,
Peng