this seems to be how PEG parsing became popular during the last couple of decades, for example; see https://bford.info/pub/lang/peg/ (peg.pdf p11: "This work is inspired by and heavily based on Birman’s TS/TDPL and gTS/GTDPL systems [from the 1970s ...] Unfortunately it appears TDPL and GTDPL have not seen much practical use, perhaps in large measure because they were originally developed and presented as formal models [...]")
