To add my example: For my first and simple compiler used in the commercial application I used yacc. The start looked simple, then I hated it. It looked to me that I invested more energy in managing to do something "the yacc way" than to actually do something. For my more recent one, much more complex, I avoided yacc using a variant of recursive descent and never came to the point to miss anything, quite the opposite.
The one production compiler I worked on used YACC because we thought it was a good idea, but this was probably correct in that the PhD that did the parser part was a student of Hopcroft. She actually published a paper about error correction based on the work there.
Any compiler I write these days would do what you are saying--recursive descent. There is a nice technique called "chart" that helps with this.
Thanks. Do you mean this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_parser It seems it's something to be more used for the natural language parsing, less for the programming languages?
That turns out to not be a very good writeup. The published work is http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=801348 and Dick Vile did a lot of work on it years after that, using it to describe an in-house production language.
