The engineering decisions that "The Larry" made, when he first tried to improve upon "awk" and then released it to the world, have been re-made many times in the continuing evolution of the interpreter. Consequently, the language is no longer perfect. (In fact, it has varied sometimes-substantially from one release to the next, although ... (politely excluding the travesty briefly called "Perl-6") ... not nearly so badly as other languages have experienced. The tool always bends to the use-case, not the other way around.