[GuuD]

Yes they are, but it's not about being novel. Parser combinators are abstraction, and damn good one: they are easily composable, reusable, and what's most important approachable even for somebody who is familiar with the functional approach but have never written parser before. While I could appreciate neat and tidy imperative recursive descent implementation, I would very much prefer to enjoy it from afar, not inside my own codebase.