awk syntax

[Peter da Silva]

Submitted-by: peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva)

In article <1991May14.185737.15746 at uunet.uu.net> arnold at audiofax.com writes:
> One of the things that happened when new awk was first realeased was a lot
> of cleaning up and consistencizing (if I may coin a term) of the awk language.

I don't see how that makes things any more consistent. If you look at the
grammer there's no ambiguity that needs to be resolved by adding that
semicolon. Does anyone have an idea what the reasoning behind this was?
To me, it adds confusion by treating a block as a statement.

Oh, and my V.3.2 system has no problem with that:

% ls -l | awk 'NF==9 { h[$3] += $5 } END {for(i in h) print i,h[i]}'
root 7985
peter 731662

(from a script I have lying around)
-- 
Peter da Silva; Ferranti International Controls Corporation; +1 713 274 5180;
Sugar Land, TX  77487-5012;         `-_-' "Have you debugged your wolf, today?"


Volume-Number: Volume 23, Number 71