Yes absolutely, I was just pointing out that there were in those days people still committed to bottom up parsing despite the advantages of top down approaches. The bottom up parsing with LR parsers that I was familiar with always used a table driven approach for the language grammar and assumed a separate lexer, sometimes hand written and sometimes generated by a program like lex. To me, the effort saved by using lex and yacc was completely lost by having to incorporate extra work to get good error messages for users out of LR parsers.

Recursive descent over a character stream might have a negative performance impact, but I’m not sure of this considering the simple grammar involved in the lexical portion of the overall grammar and the ability of today’s tools to optimize function calls via inclining etc. If I was writing a compiler today for modern hardware, I would like to try using recursive descent on a single grammar that went all the down to the characters.