iterating through list of commands to execute- which pattern?
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I have written a Java program that reads in a file containing commands to execute(in a language I made up myself). The commands are read in as strings and put into an array. Now a "dispatcher"-method will loop through the array, interpreting the commands and calling the respective methods which will act upon them. 

This of course leads to a big block of nested if-statements:

    if commandReadIn == this, do that... 
    if commandReadIn is of type x, get next element,treat next element as argument... 
    etc. 

Right now I only have a handful of commands, but what if I wanted to add hundreds? The code would become unmaintainable.

Now I'm wondering if it's possible to completely get rid of the conditional logic. The command pattern doesn't seem to be of much use here, since I would have to interpret the strings at some point anyway.. which means lots of nested "if"s. If it's not possible, what would be the best approach of restructuring the commands and their grammar in a way that will make it easy to add, edit or remove commands?