Yes well you see the problem is that I was feeling slightly guilty. When I read the article originally, i had no idea what Parrot was, so the term "Parrot Basic" suggested a version of basic called Parrot, not, as it turned out, a version of basic that was supposed to run on an alpha-version virtual machine.

Thus, you can understand that in my view, the fact that the basic interpreter (which I figured to be in perl) could not handle nested ELSE suggested that its internals were designed incorrectly (since perl is more than capable of recursion with little effort), and therefore it was in the best interests of the questioning monk to re-write his code in a manner more suited to the problem. I have no problem being blunt about this if necessary.

The issue of course, being that it was not just another basic interpreter, nor was it written in perl. Instead it was written by hand in a register/op-code language that wasn't close to finished. While I looked into it myself and determined that a recursive decent parser is practical on the VM as it stands, it is by no means as trivial as the perl variant.

Thus, by way of apology, I wrote code that would parse the Basic language the proper way and then do the necessary transformations to output a simplified Basic that would be easier to write Parrot code for until such time as it becomes easy to write a grammar within Parrot.