Some topics where you will most definitely come across fixed-width formats:
- processing older system printouts that are save to text file
- banking industry formats for payment files and statements
- industrial machine control
and my favourite.......
- source code.
My first intro to awk was using it to process COBOL code to find redundant copy libs, consolidate code, and generally cleanup code (very very crude linting). And it was brilliant. Fast, logical, readable, reliable - was everything i needed.
It is also an eminently suitable language for teaching programming because it introduces the basic concept of SETUP - LOOP - END . which is exactly the same as one will find in most business systems, you find it in arduino sketches, hell you even find it in a browser which is basically just a whole universe of stuff sitting atop a very fast loop that looks for events.
AWK fan for sure - my heirachy of languages these days would be cmd line where there is specific command doing all i need, AWK for anything needing to slice and dice records that dont contain blobs, python for complete programs, and python+nuitka or lazarus or C# when need speed and/or cross platform.
and my favourite....... - source code.
My first intro to awk was using it to process COBOL code to find redundant copy libs, consolidate code, and generally cleanup code (very very crude linting). And it was brilliant. Fast, logical, readable, reliable - was everything i needed.
It is also an eminently suitable language for teaching programming because it introduces the basic concept of SETUP - LOOP - END . which is exactly the same as one will find in most business systems, you find it in arduino sketches, hell you even find it in a browser which is basically just a whole universe of stuff sitting atop a very fast loop that looks for events.
AWK fan for sure - my heirachy of languages these days would be cmd line where there is specific command doing all i need, AWK for anything needing to slice and dice records that dont contain blobs, python for complete programs, and python+nuitka or lazarus or C# when need speed and/or cross platform.