Thoughtful commentary, Mark.

I am working with strings in a hash table which effectively makes this a 'line by line' process. I've already stripped out the comments and combined multiple lines.

There are nested conditionals, but they are fairly limited in usage and paren-delimited, so they're easy to handle.

In this case, simple-minded is better. I'm not building a universal translator, just handling a set of files once. You've given me food for thought, though, and if the usage of this code does grow like Topsy, I'll reconsider building a full parse grammar and parse tree.