And I'm still waiting for the structural regular expressions version of awk [0].

I very much like awk, I prefer it over sed, because it's easy to read. Also proper man page is all one needs. But I find myself many times doing something like this:

  match($0, /regex/) {
    x = substr($0, RSTART, RLENGTH)
    if(match(x, /regex2/)) {
      ...
    } else if(match(x, /regex3/)) {
      ...

Then I sometimes want to mix and match those strings. Or do some math on a matched number. It's a bit tedious in awk.

[0] http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/

It seems that work has already started: https://github.com/martanne/vis.