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   gawk    ( 1 )

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HISTORICAL FEATURES

There is one feature of historical AWK implementations that gawk
       supports: It is possible to call the length() built-in function
       not only with no argument, but even without parentheses!  Thus,

              a = length     # Holy Algol 60, Batman!

       is the same as either of

              a = length()
              a = length($0)

       Using this feature is poor practice, and gawk issues a warning
       about its use if --lint is specified on the command line.