[jimmyhmiller]

Yeah, you could very well be right this is all overkill. But what I wanted to do was handle the general case rather than deal with things on a case by case basis. So to extend your analogy, I consider this blog post a parser generator. It isn't suppose to parse any particular text, but to allow you to create a parser for anything you want.

I've found that my short replies to empirical advocates seem to not connect. There seemed to be an assumption that I just wanted to hold onto my opinions and not think deeply about anything. So I wanted to do the exact opposite. Be as pedantic as I could (in the space of a shortish blogpost).