http://www.paolocapriotti.com/assets/applicative.pdf
1.4 Example: applicative parsers The idea that monads are “too flexible” has also been explored, again in the context of parsing, by Swierstra and Duponcheel ([12]), who showed how to improve both performance and error-reporting capabilities of an embedded language for grammars by giving up some of the expressivity of monads. The basic principle is that, by weakening the monadic interface to that of an applicative functor (or, more precisely, an alternative