I also think that your comment about people having
written top-down recursive descent parsers for a long
time without concrete historical reference is
suprising
I do not have concrete knowledge or evidence about it, it was a statement based on intuition alone, sorry about that.
The reason why I said it is because the first parser I ever wrote (something like 10 years ago), was a top-down LL(k) parser and I had absolutely no idea about what I was doing, but in the end it worked. Many programmers are choosing LL(k) implementations for their manually-built parsers because they are so easy to reason about and build manually.
I was under the impression that C can be described as LL(k). C++ definitely can't be.
About a compiler's implementation, I realize that it can get really messy, especially for statically typed languages and especially if you want to add type inference to it. Also agree on optimization. But the thing is, most people don't need to build turing-complete languages or need efficient translations to the target representation, they just need to parse DSLs or network protocols (hence my original comment).
The reason why I said it is because the first parser I ever wrote (something like 10 years ago), was a top-down LL(k) parser and I had absolutely no idea about what I was doing, but in the end it worked. Many programmers are choosing LL(k) implementations for their manually-built parsers because they are so easy to reason about and build manually.
I was under the impression that C can be described as LL(k). C++ definitely can't be.
About a compiler's implementation, I realize that it can get really messy, especially for statically typed languages and especially if you want to add type inference to it. Also agree on optimization. But the thing is, most people don't need to build turing-complete languages or need efficient translations to the target representation, they just need to parse DSLs or network protocols (hence my original comment).