I enjoyed this essay, but still didn't get what the big benefit is of learning compilers past the point of creating a parse tree. He seemed to imply that situations 5-7 could benefit from the later part of what compilers do. I can see that you're doing something with the parse tree after you get it, but in each case it looks different from what a compiler would do.

If all that matters is being able to get a parse tree, then maybe more languages should provide a parsing function, just as Lisp does.

I wrote a source highlighter without really knowing compilers, but that's just because getting a Scheme (or BRL) parse tree is trivial.

http://brlewis.com/source.brl?q=/map.brl