Was neither agreeing nor disagreeing with your points, simply expanding "sideways", because I think the conversation about the usefulness of parsing to general usage in text editors and information processing gets derailed by the "degenerate" cases where things don't parse (because those are very important to text editors).

I think people often forget or underappreciate the lexing half of the lexer/parser divide. Yet syntax highlighting engines in most of the text editors we use these days already hint that you can do a lot of user meaningful things with "just" rudimentary, generic lexers.

As a continued aside: I felt I got really good results using a lexer as the basis for a character-based somewhat "semantic" diff tool, but still to date I've yet to really see it come into general usage outside my prototype toy (http://github.com/WorldMaker/tokdiff).