Yep. And whenever I've implemented a recursive-descent parser and dealt with left-associative operators, I've just inlined the equivalent of additive-expressio

Yep. And whenever I've implemented a recursive-descent parser and dealt with left-associative operators, I've just inlined the equivalent of additive-expression2 and the loop. E.g.: def parseAddExpr(): parseMultExpr() while peekToken in ["+", "-"]: consumeToken() parseMultExpr() Honestly, I really like recursive-descent parsing, even for expressions. It's very straightforward once you've learn a few simple patterns like that. Decently large precedence hierarchies (15-20) don't bother me; I'll typically just number the levels rather than use names like "term", "factor", "additive", or "multiplicative". It can get a little verbose, yes, but it's easy to write and skim through. (Golang-like from what I've read, though I'm not a user of Golang.) But I also find it scales better once you start adding things like ternary expressions, function calls, and type casts -- things that aren't just simple binary operators. Handling those feels a lot less clean to me with Pratt, precedence climbing, shunting yard, etc. One main downside that I'll admit to recursive descent though is that it's a bit harder to have a language with user-defined operators. I don't like those much, though, so that's not much of a loss to me.