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One more difference: top-down parsing is European and bottom-up - American :)

I'm not sure why this was downvoted - it's true(ish), and interesting. Historically, American computer scientists preferred LR parsers, and Europeans preferred LL parsers. That influenced the languages they designed.

I think i read about this in Sedgewick's 'Algorithms in C', although i could be wrong. I struggle to find any online citation. This was mentioned in the Wikipedia article at one point, but disppeared in edit described as "Removed heresay":

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LL_parser&directio...

That is quite intersting, at one point the main language in AI for Europe was Prolog and in America it was LISP, or so I read. I wonder what other instances this kind of cultural differences occured, and if the internet has had any effect on this.

> AI for Europe was Prolog and in America it was LISP,

I wouldn't say 'main language', but Prolog maybe a little more popular in Europe. The Japanese though based their 'fifth generation' project on logic programming. I once saw a Prolog Machine, a computer with the architecture optimized for Prolog and the main software written in Prolog:

http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/other/0009.html

$119000 a piece...

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