Comment by exDM69

> Veering a bit offtopic, but does anyone have any pointers to important recent work on parsing?

Parser combinators are a relatively modern topic in parsing. First research into the topic was made in the late 1980s, but parser combinators became popular after Parsec [0], a practical implementation of parser combinators in Haskell. These ideas have been borrowed to many different implementations in different languages since then.

[0] Daan Leijen: "Parsec, a fast combinator parser", 2001 http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/daan/download/...