From the webpage:
ack is a tool like grep, designed for programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code.
ack is written purely in Perl, and takes advantage of the power of Perl’s regular expressions.
It is said to be “pure Perl” so Robert shouldn’t have any problems running it on Windows. 😉
Seriously, the more I think about something Lars Marius said to me years ago, about it all being about string matching, the more that rings true.
Granting that we attach semantics to the results of that string matching but insofar as our machines are concerned, it’s just strings. We may have defined complex processing for strings, but they remain, so long as they are not viewed by us, simply strings.
(What I remember of conversations, remarks is always subject to correction by others who were present. I am sure their memories are better than mine.)