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For what it's worth, in my little corner of the world, all of the recursive descent parsers I've seen and worked with have separate lexers. I can't recall seeing a single recursive descent parser in industry that didn't separate lexing.

However, I do often see a little fudging the two together for funny corners of the language. Often that just means handling ">>" as right-shift in some contexts and nested generics in others.

That's not my impression of the majority opinion, fwiw. (I wrote my first recursive-descent parser in the 80s and I learned from pretty standard sources like one of Wirth's textbooks.)

As another data point in addition to the sibling comments, all IntelliJ language parsers use recursive descent with a separate lexer.