Contemplating an old school parser

I've been noodling around with something that needs to read in a configuration. Having sketched out a rough and ready parser, I'm now starting to wonder whether I oughtn't to cut my losses and do it properly with spot of lex & yacc. It's a difficult balance: it's small enough that a proper parser feels like overkill; but adding a proper parser would make the code more robust and allow me to add some interesting new features.

But in the process of messing around with this thing, I've been struck by just how unnecessary it all seems to be. Thanks to good high-level languages with built-in data structures and powerful bundles of libraries, getting down and dirty with old fashioned strings and linked lists feels postively antediluvian.