The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf]
I wrote a compiler in awk!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 so 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.http://cowlark.com/mercat (near the bottom)(...oh god, I wrote that in 1997?)