[thesz]

Parser combinators for lazy streams can be written as recursive descent and perform as, more or less, generalized LR parsing (exploring all tree branches "simultaneously").

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszgmh/monparsing.pdf

What is more, these combinators can express context-sensitive grammars: https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/plasma/publications/pdf/partialpar... (page 5).

And, by tweaking combinators, you can arrive to the wonders of stream processing parsing without (mostly) space leaks: http://www.cse.chalmers.se/edu/year/2015/course/afp/Papers/p...

It is easy to add syntax error position reporting, also it is easy to add syntax error corrections. All this can be done in under a day.

For me it offers good things from both worlds - declarative specification of parser generators and easy modifications from "parse damn thing by hand".

I actually encountered one case where that approach shines incommensurably: supporting old languages like VHDL. VHDL fits every parser formalism almost without seams but still has one place where you cannot do things either efficiently or elegantly: character literals and attributes. 'a' is a character literal, a'a is an invocation of attribute a on the object a. The ambiguity is in the lexing level, needing feedback from parsing level. Usual parsing tools cannot do that good enough, with parsing combinators it is trivial.