Not really. For many years, perl even shipped with a tool ("a2p" [1]) which would automatically translate awk syntax to perl -- there's very little distance bet

Not really. For many years, perl even shipped with a tool ("a2p" [1]) which would automatically translate awk syntax to perl -- there's very little distance between the two, syntactically speaking. [1]: now available as https://metacpan.org/pod/App::a2p https://metacpan.org/pod/App::a2p