On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 03:28:51PM -0400, Guido van Rossum wrote:
I would note that for small languages (much smaller than Python), writing a recursive-descent parser by hand is actually one of the most effective ways of creating a parser. I recently had the pleasure to write a recursive-descent parser for a simple Boolean query language; there was absolutely no need to involve a big gun like a parser generator. OTOH I would not consider writing a recursive-descent parser by hand for Python's Grammar -- that's why I created pgen in the first place. :-)
You might be interested to know that over in GCC land we're changing the C++ front end to use a hand-written recursive descent parser. It's not done yet, but we expect it to be easier to maintain, faster, and better at generating diagnostics than the existing yacc-based parser. zw