I've still never seen anything that can compete with recursive descent (with pratt parsing for expressions [0]) on error handling, simplicity of implementation,

I've still never seen anything that can compete with recursive descent (with pratt parsing for expressions [0]) on error handling, simplicity of implementation, and performance. The article claims recursive descent is tedious and error prone, but I've not found that to be the case. In fact, combinators like match, many, and opt map easily to either if/while or higher order functions. I also think people tend to focus too much on LL vs LR vs whatever. Clang parses the entire family of C languages with a hand-written recursive descent parser + pratt parsing and it's well-known for its error messages, speed, and memory usage. I would also say it's very readable and pleasant to work with (for a C++ parser of course ;) [0] http://javascript.crockford.com/tdop/tdop.html http://javascript.crockford.com/tdop/tdop.html