From what I can see, parser combinators are equivalent to scannerless parsing. I do not see this stated in implementations of scannerless parsing page, nor in the parsing combinators page, neither in the google generally. But, it seems they are. I didn't code the low-level rules separately or using different syntax than higher order ones.
Am I correct that parser combinators are simply scannerless parsing? Or is there a difference that I am overlooking?
It may be that both are commonly used together (that's the kind of estimation which is very sensible to perspective effects), but they are in principle different.
Scannerless means that the parser is directly fed the stream of characters instead of getting tokens recognized by a scanner with white spaces and comments removed. You can use whatever kind of parsers you want to parse the characters.
Parser combinators is a way to build a parser for a complex language from parsers for simpler one. The stream of symbols on which the bottom parsers are working may be a stream of tokens recognized by a scanner or a stream of characters.
That said, it is possible to hold the point of view that a scanner is a parser combinators (combining regular expressions) and thus that parser combinators are always scannerless parsers (if you are using different tools for both, that seems a quite abstract point of view). But even then, it is possible to have scannerless parsers which are using other parsing techniques.
