Re: [Python-Dev] Parsing vs. lexing.

tim wrote:

Parser generators are great for little languages! They're painful for real languages, though, because syntax warts accumulate and then tool rigidity gets harder to live with. Hand-crafted R-D parsers are wonderfully tweakable in intuitive ways (staring at a mountain of parse-table conflicts and divining how to warp the grammar to shut the tool up is a black art nobody should regret not learning ...).

cf. http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/00-12-106 "For me and C++, [using a parser generator] was a bad mistake." </F>