You're quite right, I over-simplified -- mea culpa! That should have said "often unify these phases". FWIW, I've written recursive descent parsers with and without separate lexers, though my sense is that the majority opinion is that "recursive descent" implies "no separate lexer".
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.)
