I don't think you are missing anything, but you probably isn't in the intended audience. IMhO, just doing it in plain C would have made the point stronger. <a

I don't think you are missing anything, but you probably isn't in the intended audience. IMhO, just doing it in plain C would have made the point stronger. <anecdote alert> A thousand years ago I was reading the legendary SmallC (for Z80) sources and was surprised to find it didn't use this technique (which IIRC is described in the Dragon Book). I rewrote it and it worked (both less source and object code, and faster too). My point: it might not be as well known as simple recursive descend. That said, it's essentially limited to expression parsing. </anecdote alert>