Almost relevant: I wrote a parser generator in and for awk (called 'yawk' even though it did LL(1) instead of LR grammars), even older than this. But at some point I lost it, and it was never released online.
AFAIK they're both ubiquitous, though you might need a particular awk like gawk for library functions, depending on what you need to do. Nowadays I'm way more likely to use Python, though of course it's a much bigger dependency.
Sorry about the injury, and good luck -- I'd like to hear how it goes.
Thanks for sharing awklisp. Nice reading for a Sunday morning.