I was scanning the GHC source by eye, and misunderstood a comment about the "parsing monad". (Alex, the equivalent of lex, uses monads to describe actions, but I thought that monads were the main interface to the lexer.) Thanks for the correction.
And the good thing is, you don't have to learn a completely new language/syntax, you can use the host language's syntax and you have full IDE support as well.
Agreed. I personally think of parser generator/parser combinator as similar to framework/library, where in the framework you have much less control and often have to rely on "escape hatches" to make custom stuff work. Whereas parser combinators are simply a library making implementing your parser much more convenient and expressive. You call the code, not the framework
