[marcusf]

An extremely layman answer is that most interesting innovation in parsing in relatively modern times has happened seems to be in the context of IDE's. I.e. incremental, high-performance parsing to support syntax highlighting, refactoring, etc. etc.

(I may be talking out of my ass here.)

[ReleaseCandidat]

Actually the most important step of parsers (as even non-incremental, slow (or better: not fast) parsers are fast enough) is error recovery (error resilience) from syntax errors (mostly half written or half deleted code). What is time consuming is e.g. type-checking. Semantic checking in general, like exhaustiveness checks of pattern matches, syntax checking is fast.

[dboreham]

In the days of punched cards error recovery was important.