Are you suggesting that parsing capability should be part of a languages standard library, or just that it is useful to have good open source libraries availabl

Are you suggesting that parsing capability should be part of a languages standard library, or just that it is useful to have good open source libraries available for the purpose? Anecdotally, my experience with Scala's parser combinators has led me to the latter conclusion bu not the former. Parsers and parser generators are very specific tools which (as useful as they are) don't see use in most applications. This leads you to a situation like the one in Scala, where open source libs such as Parboiled ( http://git.io/xpg3 http://git.io/xpg3 ) are far better than the std lib offering because they recieve more attention.