Version 0.3(beta)
=================

Michael D. Brennan provided considerable inspiration with his excellent
Mawk product.  Awka owes to Mawk the configure scripts, the AWK language
parser, and the idea that the language could be implemented for high 
performance.

Thanks also to Arnold Robbins, maintainer of Gawk, for his encouragement.
The extensive test suite in Awka is mostly based on Gawk's test suite.

Thanks to the many contributors to comp.lang.awk who made it clear that 
a freely available awk-to-C translator was needed.

Finally, thanks in advance to everyone who reports bugs or offers 
suggestions or constructive criticism, along with those who have already
contributed.

I along with everyone who uses Awka, owe special thanks to the following 
people, who have expended time & effort to report bugs, put up with poor 
quality beta releases, and have been a great source of encouragement.

  * Eiso AB <eiso@chem.rug.nl>
  * John H. DuBois III <spcecdt@armory.com>
  * chris proctor <bil@linuxstart.com>

These people are Awka 'champions'.  They have gone well above and beyond 
the call of duty in their efforts to improve Awka.  They have made many 
contributions since Awka was released, and continue to report problems and 
suggest new ideas.  There is no doubting that Awka would be a much poorer
product if not for their involvement.

In addition, I have been ably assisted by others who have made occasional
or one-off bug reports or suggestions.  I thank these folk for their efforts
and willingness to help, and I apologise if I've forgotten anyone:-

  * Finn Drablos <finn.drablos@unimed.sintef.no>
      - several large and complex scripts in the early stages of Awka,
        quickly revealing many bugs and thereby accelerating development.

  * Matthijs van Aalten <Matthijs.vanAalten@ehv.ce.philips.com>
      - Sent many concise reports that narrowed down specific problems,
        especially with variable type-casting issues.

  * Phil Magson <philm@netmap.com.au>
      - Tried to find lots of bugs, merely for the sake of finding them
        and getting his name in this file.  Sad really.

  * Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt <hhs@cbs.dtu.dk>
      - Sent a large and complex program that revealed array bounds errors
        in the management of file handles, and has provided useful bug
        reports.

  * David Lucido <DLucido@aol.com>
      - Ported to Caldera Linux (successfully I presume), and contributed
        several bug reports.

  * Hannu Toivonen <htt@rni.helsinki.fi>
      - Reported some variable initialisation errors.

  * Christoph A. Specjalski <special@muenster.de>
      - Reported some backslash problems in printf and incorrect output
        from rand().

  * Jack Kuan <jack_kuan@hotmail.com>
      - Reported some errors in the early implementation of range patterns.

  * Peter J. Farley III <pjfarley@banet.net>
      - DJGPP Port
      - Identified some memory corruption problems.
      - Helped improve the configure, make, test and installation methods,
        and wrote the DJGPP install guide (INSTALL.djg).

  * Nethanel Elzas <nelzas@ndsisrael.com>
      - Assisted with the DJGPP port, reported a parse problem (and submitted
        a patch 8-).

  * Thomas Birnthaler <Thomas.Birnthaler@gfk.de>
      - Provided an overview of additional TAWK features that could potentially
        be included in Awka.

  * Mick Donna <mdonna@cincom.com>
      - Ported to HPUX using its native C compiler.

  * John L Cox <jlcox@notes.west.raytheon.com>
      - Ported to Solaris, and reported some getline problems.

  * Michael Mauch <michael.mauch@gmx.de>
      - Identified some regular expression backslash incompatibilities, and
        some extended/local function name conflicts.

