The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf]
I wrote a compiler in awk!<p>To bytecode; I wanted to use the awk-based compiler as the initial bootstrap stage for a self-hosted compiler. Disturbingly, it worked fine. Disappointingly, it was actually faster than the self-hosted version. But it's <i>so</i> not the right language to write compilers in. Not having actual datastructures was a problem. But it was a surprisingly clean 1.5kloc or so. awk's still my go-to language for tiny, one-shot programming and text processing tasks.<p><a href="http://cowlark.com/mercat" rel="nofollow">http://cowlark.com/mercat</a> (near the bottom)<p>(...oh god, I wrote that in <i>1997</i>?)