Ignoring experimental ipython notebook files and rars for lefty.
Major refactoring of parser.py for readability on Lopen's advice. 05/26/2014

Reordered functions according to their control flow. Standardized
spacing between functions (Two linebreaks). Standardized spacings around
both conditions and for loops (Always one). Began adding type
annotations to functions. Moved backups to outside of the write_to_file
function to preserve unity of purpose. Added a main() function to run
everything in. A hard constant for the update file config was added.