You didn't miss anything. The point (or "the only point") is that he was able to reuse the language's own parser rather than writing any parsing code of his own

You didn't miss anything. The point (or "the only point") is that he was able to reuse the language's own parser rather than writing any parsing code of his own. For anyone who hasn't seen that technique, it's worth seeing. Whether it's a win depends on taste maybe.