Yes, and if you need more expressiveness for the ternary operator and so forth, you will want to structure it as mutually recursive functions, like Pratt parsin

Yes, and if you need more expressiveness for the ternary operator and so forth, you will want to structure it as mutually recursive functions, like Pratt parsing. See "Pratt Parsing and Precedence Climbing Are the Same Algorithm": http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/01.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/01.html The difference is really about how you structure your code. If you have a single recursive procedure like the above, it looks like "precedence climbing". But if you have a set of mutually recursive procedures, it looks more like Pratt parsing. But they are the same algorithm, or you can say "precedence climbing" is just a special case of Pratt parsing.