I've been thinking about what I've said in this post and I want to reword slightly. Writing a parser can be very interesting, and there's a lot of neat techniqu

I've been thinking about what I've said in this post and I want to reword slightly. Writing a parser can be very interesting, and there's a lot of neat techniques, and since we're talking about learning here and not making production compilers, it's certainly a worthwhile endeavor. What I really mean to say is that your parser doesn't have a lot of effect on the rest of your compiler design. In the end, it's a function that takes input text to an AST. You can go back and replace a YACC generated one later, if you want to know more. Of course if you choose a simple to parse input language (like lisp) then you can write a simple handwritten parser off the bat.