Parsers and Combinators

This is interesting to me. I recently wrote an interpreter for a parsing language (similar to the one in the article) in common lisp and also a recursive descent parser generator for an almost identical language (to my previous one).

I went back a few articles and found this: http://alexicalmistake.com/2008/06/scheme-parser-combinators..., to which I've concluded that I might be using combinators in my interpreted parsing language because every operator (such as 'repeat' or 'find-next') returns a function that performs the operations, but I am still a bit unclear.

If anyone is interested, I wrote a bit about them and gave an example of the parse tree created here: http://ioreader.com/2009/01/01/common-lisp-recursive-descent... As I am new to common lisp (reading ANSI CL, actually, although I've been playing with things not yet mentioned in the book!), the code leaves a lot to be desired.

Otherwise, very interesting article. These are the subjects that interest me most and approachable articles like these help me a lot.