It sounds like you would like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL. Though if you had to do enough work with text, my bet

It sounds like you would like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL. Though if you had to do enough work with text, my bet is that you'd eventually figure out why regexes won. They are simple, straightforward, and just enough to tackle the occasional matching problem on your way to doing something else.