[SpaceHobo]

I had great fun writing the traditional "Cloak of Darkness" exercise for Interactive Fiction in pure AWK:

http://zork.net/~nick/loyhargil/if/if.awk

For comparison, here are all the published examples of this exercise in a variety of systems:

http://www.firthworks.com/roger/cloak/

I won't say it's the best tool for this job, but I feel that the awkishness provides a certain elegance to some aspects.