Same experience here; recursive descent parser advantages: - It's just normal code; you don't have to go learn a whole 'nother thing - Easy and fun to write (

Same experience here; recursive descent parser advantages: - It's just normal code; you don't have to go learn a whole 'nother thing - Easy and fun to write (ymmv) - Does not add extra dependencies to your build system (the time I've wasted getting the right version of yacc installed just to handle software that parses some trivial grammar...) - You can easily deliver really good error messages to your users (they love this!) Disadvantages: If you're not careful, you can accidentally end up w/ some sort of weird frankenstein grammar