Are you kidding me "not much advantage"? You write mountains of C code where you manipulate arrays of characters every now and then interpreting them as string

Are you kidding me "not much advantage"? You write mountains of C code where you manipulate arrays of characters every now and then interpreting them as strings. This is like one of the most dangerous things you could do in C, and will take you forever to write and to iron out all the cases where you accidentally read past the missing null terminator. And you are liberated from this madness by using a generator. It's not even about the quality of the resulting parser (it's also rare that parsing is the bottleneck in larger programs that need to parse something, so the question of shift-reduces vs recursive etc. aren't worth answering really). It's more about confidence that the program won't crash on a different computer with different memory allocator. > everything is global variables This is like information from the 90s... That's not the case for a long time. You can still do it like this, but re-entrant parsers have been a thing for a long time... I've written multithreaded parsers using Flex / Bison. Again, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Flex / Bison are the best combo. I prefer DCGs because it's easier for me to think in that way, for example. But the benefit of having popular tools with decades of track record and easily available outweighs the benefits of hand-written parser, unless you are somehow very good and into writing parsers. The code in question doesn't show any such ability / intention. To the point that I was questioning if the code may have been generated and later "prettyfied" by hand. I mean, it's not awful, but it's not like it's doing it in some sort of a remarkable way... It just looks like a lot of tedious labor.