>awk applies actions to lines matching patterns. The design seems concise and limited on purpose.
That is what I meant by a "data driven mode".
>what sort of features would you want to add?
An extended awk could at least add new types of patterns, e.g., binary, stateful and nested patterns or formal grammars, regex patterns with match groups, etc., meaning you could correctly process "real" CSV files or log files with complex structure. I believe these features could be made to fit in with the design of the language making them all feel like they belong to the same kind. It could also add new functions such as ones for Unicode text normalization.
Perl5 does much of this and Perl6 even introduces grammars but because of some of its design decisions for me Perl is not a joy to use like Awk. Both of its versions are just plain too big.
You can use multiple file options, but I am not sure if you can include files to load a library file from within awk itself, nor am I aware of any options for conditional linking. Those would be nice, it would make it easy to write awk libraries.
That is what I meant by a "data driven mode".
>what sort of features would you want to add?
An extended awk could at least add new types of patterns, e.g., binary, stateful and nested patterns or formal grammars, regex patterns with match groups, etc., meaning you could correctly process "real" CSV files or log files with complex structure. I believe these features could be made to fit in with the design of the language making them all feel like they belong to the same kind. It could also add new functions such as ones for Unicode text normalization.
Perl5 does much of this and Perl6 even introduces grammars but because of some of its design decisions for me Perl is not a joy to use like Awk. Both of its versions are just plain too big.