Hi,
>>What I am a bit concerned about is that I've made the BNF grammar more 
>>complex or that I've made it stupid. If a dot/period is followed by 
>>whitespace, it terminates >>the current statement; else it can validly be 
>>part of a word or keyword.

Your changes allow the following method to be compiled ...
    x.y
       ^42

and then ...
    1 x.y.
evaluates to 42, which is probably not what you intended

Cheers,
Andy