Can you give me some pointers to some production quality parsers written with this style? By production quality, I mean "used in practice by a significant number of users".
I've looked at dozens of parsers, both for shells and for other programming languages, and none of them use this technique. I've studied many forms of parsing, and written my own lexing and parsing library/language. This included going on a pretty deep dive into PEGs.
I'm going to be a bit rude and say that parser combinators look appropriate for toy programs only. shell is the opposite of a toy language... it's fairly big, and has a very precise spec with all the hairs and scars of evolution.
I've looked at dozens of parsers, both for shells and for other programming languages, and none of them use this technique. I've studied many forms of parsing, and written my own lexing and parsing library/language. This included going on a pretty deep dive into PEGs.
I'm going to be a bit rude and say that parser combinators look appropriate for toy programs only. shell is the opposite of a toy language... it's fairly big, and has a very precise spec with all the hairs and scars of evolution.