[wlib]

Keeping a tiny bounded lookahead is essential for the extremely fast and memory-efficient parsing that browsers want for CSS. Sass, less, &c. don't really have to care about that, and they have the benefit of also being able to completely trust that the user won't give pathological inputs - unlike browsers on the web. Also, I think the standards bodies want to minimize their changes in general, to keep the door open for unexpected changes later.

[adamrezich]

I'm no expert in parsing but my gut tells me there's no way this can actually be a performance concern as much as a implementation complexity concern

[klodolph]

Right... you don't want to force everyone to make significant changes to their parsers. If you are writing a C or C++ parser, you know up-front that there is lots of funny business in the language syntax and can plan your parser accordingly. If you are writing parser for something a bit more sane, like Java or CSS, then you can choose a much simpler architecture for your parser.

Part of this means that if, say, your language is LL(1) or something like that, you will want to keep future versions of the language LL(1). This can put you in a bit of a tight spot sometimes, when you're making backwards-compatible changes.