awk

• was written by Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan
• was first described in Software Practice and Experience in July, 1978
• uses Extended Regular Expressions
• has a rich grammar (with if, while, for etc.)
• works as follow
  1. execute the BEGIN-Block
  2. read a entire line from stdin into $0
  3. elaborate it according to the code in the program body
  4. if not EOF (or exit) then goto 2
  5. execute the END-Block
• isn't at all awkward