just as an aside, you never know how your code might be used. this more often exposes bugs for unplanned events. but sometimes ...
awk is my favorite language for simple stuff. if you don't know it was developed by alfred Aho, peter Weinberger and brian Kernighan, hence it's name, in the 1970s. i think it's the granddaddy of all scripting languages.
it was intended as just another tool in a unix pipe and didn't support user defined functions until a user came in with a page long awk program.
i thought i had read that their collection jaws (A, W and K) dropped to the floor because the had never considered it being used that way.
BTW, brian kernighan has co-authored a number of books covering a not so trivial set of topic including software tools, the unix programming language. but the Practice of Programming kinda went back to basics (see table of contents) starting with names of variables