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Quite some time ago, a smart cookie named Phillip Wadler published a paper explaining the concept of “parser combinators”, a method of representing the well-understood concept of text parsing as the composition of atomic constructs which behaved according to monadic law. This idea understandably captured the imaginations of a number of leading researchers, eventually developing into the Haskell parsec library. Being a functional language with academic roots, it is understandable that Scala would have an implementation of the combinator concept included in its standard library.