Awk has evolved? GNU Awk has---somewhat. It has a clumsy facility in the place of a proper FFI called the "extension API" for binding to C libraries. You need to compile C code to use it, and the API has been a moving target. It has a way to work with XML. It has an "in place" editing mode, and other things like bignum integer support via GMP (requiring the -M option to be used). Plus various minor extensions to POSIX, like full regex support in RS (record separator), a way to tokenize fields positively rather than delimit by matching their separators, a way to extract fixed-width fields, an @include mechanism, a way to indirect on functions and such. None of it adds up to very much.