It surprized me that AWK had dictionaries and no declaration of vars that make it feel like a modern scripting langauge even though it was written in the 70s.
It turns out though that this is because Perl and later Ruby were inspired by AWK and even support these line by line processing idioms with BEGIN and END sa well.
ruby -n -a -e 'puts "#{$F[0] $F[1]}"'
ruby -ne '
BEGIN { $words = Hash.new(0) }
$_.split(/[^a-zA-Z]+/).each { |word|
$words[word.downcase] += 1 }
END {
...
I think it's pretty obvious that awk syntax is ultimately the main inspiration for JavaScript syntax, with optional semicolon as stmt terminator, regexp literals, for (x in y), the function keyword, a[x] associative array accessors, etc.
It turns out though that this is because Perl and later Ruby were inspired by AWK and even support these line by line processing idioms with BEGIN and END sa well.