Welcome, I'm glad you actually bothered to put me up in your blog ^^
That said it would probably be a good project to build some sort of decent parsing in Arc. It might be good to use raymyer's parser combinator library, which although intended to work on lists will probably also work on string scanners. That said while I have a general knowledge of parser combinators I haven't actually used them (although I did write a value-change-dump (.vcd) file parser which I suspect used parser combinator concepts before I even learned about parser combinators - it was plenty slow though).
The other concern is the real problem of namespace pollution, raymyers' code uses some very short names - alt, lit. Fortunately they're not macros; raymyers specifically introduced optional laziness via delay-parser in order to reduce macro namespace collision.
