> Unfortunately, unlike many other languages, SQLite has no formal specification describing how it should be parsed.

BorgCfg had exactly the same situation.

mpvl (borgcfg original author, author of https://cuelang.org/) and others had tried to refine bcl while bcl itself is underspecified.

Eventually, the team built a drop-in replacement of bcl and specced out the language almost entirely.

The biggest lesson to me was that engineering never has any short cut.