Madness indeed!

Thanks for all of the advice.

I ended up returning to my more intuitive line-by-line approach - slurping the file into an array, rather than into a string. Only a few of the operators require stateful stuff - where I now look ahead in the array for state affecting keywords until I find the terminating semicolon to make a decision for the line I'm on. This seems to work acceptably - so far.

Thanks again,

-"chon"