How libfawk supports maintaining bigger scripts

Unlike some traditional AWK (or BASIC or Pascal) dialects, libfawk also tries to extend the language to make large, modular system of scripts maintainable, modules reusable. For this, libfawk offers the following extra features:

• array-in-array and an alternative, struct-like array indexing syntax (fawk, fbas, fpas)
• functions are first class objects, function references can be saved in variables and arrays and can be passed as parameters
• the include directive (fawk, fbas, fpas)

These three extensions togheter make it easy to write reusable libraries that maintain struct-like data or even objects (which are really just arrays). An object (array) can have members that reference to "methods" (fawk/fpas/fbas functions handling the given object) - so things like obj.print(obj, ...) work. Because array-in-array, a struct (or object) can have members that are other structs (or objects), allowing the script to build hierarchic data.

Since array-in-array uses array referencing, not deep copy, it is easily possible to represent lists or trees of structs (arrays) in memory.