Parser combinators are one of those ideas that is really powerful in practice, but will never be mainstream because it had the bad fortune of coming from the functional programming world. It's a shame too, because parser combinators are what made parsers click for me.
Take the hard problem of parsing a language, break it down into the much simpler problem of reading tokens, then write simple "combinators" (and, or, one_or_many, etc etc) to combine these simple parsers into larger more complex parsers.
You could almost build an entire parser combinator library from scratch from memory, because none of the individual components are complicated.
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