Unpopular opinion: anything that outputs an AST is, by definition, not a parser but a recognizer with extra steps. The reason for this is that an abstract tree

Unpopular opinion: anything that outputs an AST is, by definition, not a parser but a recognizer with extra steps. The reason for this is that an abstract tree has not yet been parsed. The input is only parsed once the AST has been traversed, presumably by a much-maligned recursive descent method.