[fuzztester]

>a seemingly very complex problem that I had no idea how to approach can be made simple by breaking it down into the right primitives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth

From the Publications section of that Wikipedia page:

>The April 1971 Communications of the ACM article "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement",[22][23] concerning the teaching of programming, is considered to be a classic text in software engineering.[24] The paper is considered to be the earliest work to formally outline the top-down method for designing programs.[25][26] The article was discussed by Fred Brooks in his influential book The Mythical Man-Month and was described as "seminal" in the ACM's brief biography of Wirth published in connection to his Turing Award.[27][28]

[microtherion]

Wirth also wrote an extremely accessible book on Compiler Construction, using exactly the hand written recursive descent parsing approach discussed by OP.

The initial edition was published in 1976, in German, but the latest version is available online:

https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/Compil...

There are also parser generators like ANTLR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTLR) which take an input not unlike yacc, but generate a LL parser using explicit code, rather than the table driven LALR parsing of yacc.

[fuzztester]

Thank you. Just to confirm, by "accessible", do you mean easy to understand?

Anyway, I think I had come across that book on the net, but did not check it out at the time. I don't remember the exact reason, maybe it was because I didn't want to go into the subject of compilers at the time, and was only interested in interpreters, because I prefer to take things one step at a time.

Now I will check it out.

[microtherion]

Yes, accessible in the sense of being readable without extensive prior knowledge. If I recall correctly, I read the initial edition while still in high school.

[fuzztester]

Got it, thanks.