Parsing Expressions by Recursive Descent (1999)

I generally think of Pratt parsing/precedence climbing as a "variant" of recursive descent. But there are expression parsers in GNU expr and bash that use recursive descent but do NOT use pratt parsing/precedence climbing. They make "extra" calls based on precedence levels encoded in a "grammar".

(That is actually mentioned in the intro to the article.)

I clarified this a bit here:

Precedence Climbing is Widely Used http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/03/30.html

I guess I would say the terminology is still kinda confusing. If you consider Pratt parsing and precedence climbing are the same, there are still at least 3 distinct ways to parse expressions, all found in working code. Which one you use doesn't really matter once it's working :)

The plain recursive descent style is less efficient in theory, and somewhat longer. But I doubt it would show up in a profile of any real system.

The "single recursive function" style of "precedence climbing" does appear to pretty popular, so that's why I wrote the followup post. It's the same algorithm but written in a common coding style.