I had to look up whether you were technically accurate (I've a PhD in compilers but parsing's not really my thing), and I think the answer is "it depends, maybe?"

To get to the root of the issue though, there is not a parser.

Well, one could consider the function that takes each keystroke to be a parser - though I don't know if that's technically correct either. So perhaps the more accurate thing to say is there is not a step that takes a textual source file and parses it.