Even if you are writing a production compiler, you will likely not be using a tool, nor writing a tool, to generate the parser. Most production commercial compilers in practice use hand-written recursive descent with a hand-written lexer, which itself potentially uses feedback from the parser (very handy for parsing C or C++). Recursive descent usually gives context for error recovery that matches the way most programmers think about language syntax; and with it being written by hand, the recovery can be tweaked to be as smart as necessary.
Also, IDE / editor support like intellisense can greatly benefit from integration with a recursive descent parser. If you encode the cursor's position as a special token, the parser can handle that token and do a deep return (throw an exception, longjmp, whatever) with relevant context, active scopes, etc.
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Even if you are writing a production compiler, you will likely not be using a tool, nor writing a tool, to generate the parser. Most production commercial compilers in practice use hand-written recursive descent with a hand-written lexer, which itself potentially uses feedback from the parser (very handy for parsing C or C++). Recursive descent usually gives context for error recovery that matches the way most programmers think about language syntax; and with it being written by hand, the recovery can be tweaked to be as smart as necessary.
Also, IDE / editor support like intellisense can greatly benefit from integration with a recursive descent parser. If you encode the cursor's position as a special token, the parser can handle that token and do a deep return (throw an exception, longjmp, whatever) with relevant context, active scopes, etc.
this is also very very very true. And thus why parsing combinator libraries are one of the sanest defaults one can adopt in dealing with parsing