these tools input grammar , output code processes series of tokens more useful, syntax tree. these tools written in form of library instead? reason generating source code output? there performance gain? more flexible end user? easier implement authors of yacc , antlr? sorry if question vague, i'm curious historical reasons behind decisions authors made, , purpose auto-generated code has in today's environment. there's big performance advantage achieved parser generator working out interactions of grammar rules respect 1 another, , compiling result code. one build interpreters accepted grammars , did parsing; there parser types ( earley ) relatively @ that, , 1 compute grammar interactions @ runtime (earley parsers kind of anyway) rather offline , execute parsing algorithm. but pay parsing performance penalty of 10 100x slowdown, , big storage demand. if parsing using small grammars, or parsing small documents, might not matter. grammars many parser gen...