Not disagreeing with the overall point but that particular example is from an AWK JSON parser implementation so the whole point is to do it in AWK. If you look

Not disagreeing with the overall point but that particular example is from an AWK JSON parser implementation so the whole point is to do it in AWK. If you look at the entire file it's not too bad considering. Funnily the actual Go JSON decoder code ends up doing something similar during scanning: https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/encoding/json/decode.go#L330 https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/encoding/json/d...