[Taniwha]

Did something similar in 6800 assembly, left recursion of course limits you even more - but it helps fit that tiny tiny compiler into 2k.

I actually like yacc/bison - they're good for most purposes and deliberately designing a non-LALR (or more a non-LR) language on purpose (rather than because you don't know any better) is usually silly - you do need to 'get' the concept of building a parse tree from bottom up - assembling it from larger and larger snippets as you go

Oh and yacc/bison run about 10 times faster than equivalent I wrote 10 years before they existed so I'm not complaining

I tend to use the same bespoke lexical analyser I've used for years and hack it to suit - it includes support for symbol tables/etc and runs really fast, no need to reinvent the wheel