There's still "lookahead" in a hand written parser. The lookahead is decided case by case. Performance penalty only comes if we backtrack in our hand written p

There's still "lookahead" in a hand written parser. The lookahead is decided case by case. Performance penalty only comes if we backtrack in our hand written parsers. I don't think we usually do that. Any glimpse of top-down parser would be simply too slow.