awk and Perl (was Re: How to print last <n> pages of a file?)

[Brian Rice]

:-<words>  

That is a picture of a person (me) eating his words.

In the referred-to posting, a Perl aficionado gives a Perl solution
to a problem (printing the last n pages of a file), along with a 
perfectly gracious plug for Perl.  Now, for assorted ungracious 
reasons, I have not been in the Perl camp; I felt that...

    (a) Perl code is too cryptic;
    (b) One can write a solution to any old problem using 
        standard tools in less time than it takes to retrieve
        and compile Perl; and
    (c) Perl, being a kitchen-sink kinda thing, is just sorta
        inelegant.

So when I saw the Perl posting, I thought, "Hah!  I'll just knock
off a solution using awk...won't take a second, especially given
awk's capacity to use a given character other than space as a
field separator."

Well, that was some time ago.  Quite some time ago indeed.  
There goes (b).  I'm giving up; it's pretty tricky.  If you'd like
to try, remember that you have to deal with input files like this:

    This is page 1.
    More text on page 1.
    ^L
    This is page 2.
    ^LThis is page 3.^L
    ^LThis is page 5 (yes, I do mean 5).
    More text on page 5.^LThis is page 6.
    More text on page 6.^LThis is page 7.^L
    ^LThis is page 9.^LThis is page 10.^L

My code is a rat's nest, and it's looking like it'll get uglier
the closer it gets to being correct (not that it's going to 
get any closer).  Bye-bye, (a).  And it occurred to me
as I was toiling that awk is kind of a kitchen-sink thing too,
except we're used to it.  Bye-bye, (c).  If anyone has an awk
solution which can handle the above text file and is elegant
and clearly understood, I'd like to see it.  Yer a tougher
dude than I.  (Don't forget to handle the case where you go
to a new page because you had more than 65 lines on the previous
one; admittedly, that's the easy part, but we gotta be
complete.  And the Perl poster seems to have forgotten 
that case in his [admittedly justifiable] enthusiasm :-).)

So maybe I'll be learning Perl soon.  But I do have one final
malediction: I really think that the public competitions we've
seen among Perl devotees to find maximally compact solutions 
to coding problems are ill-advised because (if you'll pardon
the overweening moralism) they set a bad example for new
programmers.  There's nothing like time spent maintaining 
other people's code to change yer perspective on that sort 
of high-jinks...  But I'm just a killjoy, anyway.  Have fun, 
y'all.
-- 
Brian Rice   rice at dg-rtp.dg.com   +1 919 248-6328
DG/UX Product Assurance Engineering
Data General Corp., Research Triangle Park, N.C.
"Boy, I hope those dogs eat that cat." --Tula, age 3