Agreed, although I would not say "most" can be formulated as CFGs. There is the lexer issue you mention, and that is mentioned in that article, but there are a

Agreed, although I would not say "most" can be formulated as CFGs. There is the lexer issue you mention, and that is mentioned in that article, but there are also tons of other issues in real languages. Languages that are close to context free: Python, Java, JavaScript, R, Go, awk. (and I think Standard ML and OCaml) Languages that are not even close: C, C++, Perl, Unix shell, make. Languages I'm not sure about but which probably fall in the "no" category: PHP, Ruby, C#. So I think that is enough to warrant some research into parsing tools for non-CFGs. (PEGs are interesting and I explored them for some of these applications)