I fell in love with Perl 3 over twenty years ago and loved how it took the best parts of both awk and sed and added extra features while making the overall syntax more consistent. Ironically, the consistency of Perl's syntax in those days (vs having to remember awk, sed, and other somewhat overlapping tools, each with its own awkward syntax) made it an amazingly convenient super-tool for stream processing. Perl 4 came along almost immediately, and I couldn't believe how powerful those little "Perl one-liners" could be.

With Perl 5, Perl essentially repositioned itself as a full-blown, general-purpose programming language, with all the power that entailed, but still stuck with a syntax based on essentially trying to be a more powerful and consistent superset of sed and awk.

These days, I think we could do a lot better with a stream processor with the stream-processing focus and one-liner power of Perl 4 but without the needless (these days) constraint of retaining the syntactic hash of ancient unix utilities.

Perl indeed. I know there are a lot of modern compilers out there, but speaking about parsing files I think perl suits me the most in terms of code readability/speed balance.