Generalizations of Brzozowski's method of derivatives of regular expressions to grammars?
You might be interested in this paper:


  Yacc is Dead by Matthew Might and David Darais, 2010
  
  We present two novel approaches to
  parsing context-free languages. The
  first approach is based on an
  extension of Brzozowski's derivative
  from regular expressions to
  context-free grammars. The second
  approach is based on a generalization
  of the derivative to parser
  combinators. The payoff of these
  techniques is a small (less than 250
  lines of code), easy-to-implement
  parsing library capable of parsing
  arbitrary context-free grammars into
  lazy parse forests. Implementations
  for both Scala and Haskell are
  provided. Preliminary experiments with
  S-Expressions parsed millions of
  tokens per second, which suggests this
  technique is efficient enough for use
  in practice.


Also of potential interest:


Yacc is Not Dead, review of this paper by Russ Cox, of re2 fame.
Yacc is dead: An update, reply from Matt Might.
Functional Pearl: Parsing with Derivatives by Matthew Might, David Darais and Daniel Spiewak - an updated version of the "Yacc is Dead" paper, presented at ICFP 2011 in Tokyo.