Subj : Re: Question to SpiderMonkey 's developers about scaner/parser To : Lyalin Iliya From : Brendan Eich Date : Thu Aug 07 2003 10:30 am Lyalin Iliya wrote: >Why did not you use yacc-like and lex-like tools for >create your scaner and parser in SpiderMonkey? > Because when I wrote JS in 1995 and 1996, a recursive descent parser fit the top-down nature of the JS grammar, and was easier to modify as the language grew, had better error recovery opportunities, and didn't have large tables, and didn't require running parser or scanner generation tools by hand on all 15 platforms Netscape 2 built on (or else running once and checking in generated source each time the grammar or lexical specification changed). /be .