i'm not very interested in a solution that doesn't use tools available to the build. you've not shown that there is sufficient pain here to force an external solution. i'm not sure i buy your claims about awk and size of program. IME, it just requires that one is strict to rules.
if you want to use python for creating files in the tree for _our_ things, then i think you have to propose adding python to src/tools. [*] why aren't you willing to discuss a lua version? it has most of the features you complained awk is missing, and would make it relatively easy to unit-test the components easily. .mrg. [*] i support this generally, and as a non-public visible library that our gdb can use as well. i do not think we should add it to /usr/bin (but i might be convinceable that it can be installed in a non-standard location, using non- standard paths for libararies, as long as it does not have anything to do with or interfere with pkgsrc or other ways of using python.)