Aharon Robbins wrote:

> What happens if you compile them in and run the grep test suite?

The test suite passes, but grep is bigger and (I presume) slower.  The 
GREP-related changes are for performance, and shouldn't affect behavior.

How about if we apply the attached patch to dfa.c, in both gawk and 
grep?  I tried it just now, and gawk passed all its tests too.  Or, if 
there's some reason this patch would introduce a bug into gawk, I'd like 
to fix the grep test cases to detect the bug.