So we did build the DDL handwritten and did well on that portion of the product, but given the constraint of me being the only person to write the parser for th

So we did build the DDL handwritten and did well on that portion of the product, but given the constraint of me being the only person to write the parser for the DML, along with having to be done and error free in three weeks where I was also occupied, all while being written in C, I felt yacc really helped a lot there. The big thing for this particular project was all the pitfalls of C with having to track memory allocations and passing arrays of pointers around and mentally keeping track. Yacc streamlined this a lot. If this was a production project and not a class I took along side four other, hand writing would be a serious option I'd consider (mostly for error reporting purposes like you mentioned), but I might even lean towards getting an MVP done in a parser generator and eventually converting over to handwritten if the need arose.