[DenisM]

Recursive descend is imperative, while regex is declarative.

Regex may be ugly, but you lose something important when you move from declarative to imperative.

[jerf]

"Recursive descent" has that name precisely because it is not the only parsing alternative, hence we can not simply call it "parsing".

[raiph]

Perl 6 unifies "regexes" and recursive descent. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039680 or, say, https://github.com/Mouq/json5/blob/master/lib/JSON5/Tiny/Gra...