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Lila: A Lil Interpreter in Posix Awk


WK is among the most ubiquitous programming languages in the world. Much like ed, the standard text editor, awk is a mandatory component of any POSIX operating system.

On a fresh-out-of-the-box Mac, tunneling into the embedded Linux environment on your router, or scrabbling away at GitBash on a Windows machine, you may not have access to Python, Perl, or even Tcl, but you can rest assured that some flavor of awk is already installed. In our modern age, AWK is frequently regarded as a domain-specific language akin to sed, constrained in its usefulness to batch processing of semi-structured text files and streams. Lil is a multi-paradigm language with a rich set of primitive operators and a “batteries-included” standard library featuring such goodies as JSON, XML, CSV and structured binary parsing, first-class database-style tables with a SQL-like query syntax, and functional niceties like a REPL and tail-call elimination.

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