A look at Gawk 4.0.0

AWK is no where near as bad as Perl, imo. There are no variable context operators that mean you have stick funny chars in front of every variable reference (vars are referenced just by name - $ is just a field dereference operator that acts on vars). The uglyness here is primarily just from its inherent nature as being a very long conditional to control a print statement, and squashing it all on one line.