Silly comment. Awk is nonstandardized, different in different environments. Perl5 is the same everywhere. don't you recall that that's actually the main reason perl was invented, as a more powerful and more uniformly compatible replacement for awk?
I've written some fairly complicated programs meant to run on a very wide range of Awks, and while there are minor differences between dialects, it isn't hard to stick to the POSIX-standard core language.