> It has only enough functionality to provide text matching and substitution.
Gawk at least can do a lot more than that. Reading and writing files, network communications, and run arbitrary shell commands, for example. It's certainly not as powerful as perl but it's also not limited to just text matching and substitution.
Edit: figured I would provide some examples. Here's an http server and a first person shooter in gawk. Maybe not so practical but they show some of gawk's capabilities.
Gawk at least can do a lot more than that. Reading and writing files, network communications, and run arbitrary shell commands, for example. It's certainly not as powerful as perl but it's also not limited to just text matching and substitution.
Edit: figured I would provide some examples. Here's an http server and a first person shooter in gawk. Maybe not so practical but they show some of gawk's capabilities.
https://github.com/kevin-albert/awkserver
https://github.com/TheMozg/awk-raycaster