I expect he means that awk may seem more like a DSL than a full-fledged language, even though/if it's possible to use it like a programming language. (Another e

I expect he means that awk may seem more like a DSL than a full-fledged language, even though/if it's possible to use it like a programming language. (Another example may be that it wasn't really intended to be a general-purpose language, IIRC that chapter in Masterminds of Programming.) I don't know that anyone necessarily believes you couldn't program with awk in an absolute sense, but it doesn't read like a glorified shell script in the way that perl is explicitly designed to.