I mean, with enough hacking around, anything can work. But the code had gotten extremely complicated and brittle, and it was still not handling all the edge cases. Readability was important for this project, since I want to be able to modify the parser later to add new extensions to the language.
Recursive descent required too much backtracking and state resets, which made the code buggy and unreadable (and the error reporting was awful). Pratt parser simply parsed wrong (presumably because I couldn't figure out the right way to sort the precedences).
Gotcha! I've been thinking of trying my hand at a C parser but it always gave me the sense that it was more annoying than it should be haha. Interesting to near your experience, thanks for sharing!
