I vaguely recall somebody mentioning a parser library on Hackage where "try" is the default behaviour and you turn it off explicitly, rather than turning it on explicitly. Apparently this is much more intuitive. But unfortunately I can't remember what the hell the library was...
If you have only ever used the parsec combinators before, then you might be
pleasantly surprised by polyparse: all of the same functionality is available,
but it removes the confusion that all too commonly arises from a failure to
use parsec's try combinator correctly. Ambiguous grammars often fail to be
compositional in parsec, and it can be a black art guessing where to introduce
a try to fix it. In contrast, polyparsers are by default fully compositional.
It is possible to improve their efficiency (and the accuracy of error
messages) by inserting commits (which are the dual of try), but it is not
necessary for writing a correct parser, and furthermore, it is usually obvious
where it can be beneficial to add a commit.