Agreed. I don't have a CS background either and despite reading a few textbooks, I could never grok how one would write a parser for a language. After reading C

Agreed. I don't have a CS background either and despite reading a few textbooks, I could never grok how one would write a parser for a language. After reading Crenshaw's paper, I was able to put together a quick & dirty scripting language for a text processing program I was writing. Crenshaw's approach does have downsides; as noted in the article, there's no internal representation of the program so optimisations like short-circuit evaluation of logical operations are difficult, if not impossible...