[motorest]

> The idea that you're going to hand-roll a parser generator and then use that to generate a parser and the result is going to be less buggy than just hand-rolling a recursive descent parser, screams "I've never written code outside of an academic context"

Your comment is quite funny as hand-rolling a recursive descent parser is the kind of thing that is often accused of being a) bug-prone, b) only done in academic environments.

[paddim8]

What? Accused of only being done in academic environments? Never heard that. Academics seem to spend 99% of their time talking about parser generators and LR parsing for some reason while most production compilers have handwritten recursive descent parsers...

[jfyi]

Same here, recursive descent is what I have run into in the real world.

I'm just happy when parsing isn't being done with some absurdly long regex with no documentation.

[vidarh]

Having written several parser generators, all my production parsers are hand-written - either pure recursive descent or a combination of recursive descent and operator precedence parsing.

The reason being that the reason there are so many parser generators is largely that we keep desperately looking for a way of writing one that isn't sheer pain in production use.