Idiots don't know how to parse...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28256/equation-expression-parser-with-precedence

WTF? The accepted answer is from someone who thinks recursive descent is "hard" and a ridiculously bloated parser-generator is "easy"? Pure bisonshit! Almost every real (and toy) compiler uses some variant of recursive-descent. Even GCC, which would probably be the biggest user of Bison, moved to recursive-descent years ago.

These aren't even programmers, these are Java-sipping codemonkeys who know next to nothing about how anything really works and can only parrow "reinventing the wheel" and other "enterprise best practices" bullshit.

That fucking answer.

People here have offered much sound advice. My only warning against skipping the parsing tools or just using the Shunting Yard algorithm or a hand rolled recursive decent parser is that little toy languages1 may someday turn into big actual languages with functions (sin, cos, log) and variables, conditions and for loops.

Well, my house might one day need to be a skyscraper, so I bought half a million bricks that I leave lying around just in case. Reminds me of that "you don't want to buy a hammer, you want to buy a hammer factory factory factory" parable about frameworks.

But ShitOverflow always does this. There is always some cunt who doesn't want to answer the question, but wants you to upgrade to Seeples17 and use aa prealpha development version of Boost when all the asker wanted to do was balance a tree or some shit. It gets accepted, becomes the first google result, and all other vaguely related questions get directed to it, leaving the real question unanswered, or hidden at best.