Why would you let the grammar dictate the architecture of your compiler? Left recursion in things like expressions is completely trivial to eliminate. If you w

Why would you let the grammar dictate the architecture of your compiler? Left recursion in things like expressions is completely trivial to eliminate. If you want to e.g. embed a DSL in a language, something that's really easy to do with recursive descent, it's worth spending 30 seconds or so to remove left recursion from your expression rules. Etc. > You first write/immagine the grammar that you want to write, whatever is most intuitive for you. IMO this is the road to hard to parse languages; if you genuinely advocate this path, you'll end up needing a GLR parser before you know it. I think it's much better to ensure your grammar is parseable with LL(1); not only is the tooling simpler, but the language will be less ambiguous for human users too. Follow the example of Pascal, not C++. This is what I'd advocate even for people doing hand-written recursive descent on a new language: validate your grammar with an LL(k) tool even if you don't use the generated parser. (You've ended up sounding a bit like Ira Baxter, who's often seen around the net selling his DMS toolkit. He has a strong self-interest in people writing complicated grammars, so that he can sell them his services...)