> everyone should write for their first compiler in Pascal for a
> simple language and no cheating using YACC. You need to write the whole
> thing if you want to understand how parsing really works.
Yacc certainly makes it easier to write parsers for big grammars, but it's far from cheating. You need to know a lot more about parsing to use Yacc than you need to roll your own.
Hand parsing of a tiny grammar is almost a necessary step on the way to understanding Yacc. But I think hand-building the whole parser for a compiler is unnecessary torture--like doing trigonometry with log tables.
Doug