My first project ever as a professional programmer was writing a recursive descent parser - in 1981, in Fortran, of Jovial language code. Of course there were n

My first project ever as a professional programmer was writing a recursive descent parser - in 1981, in Fortran, of Jovial language code. Of course there were no other choices. Thankfully today you can avoid writing your own, though sometimes it still pays to write it by hand.