I've been using lex/yacc and now I'm trying to switch to ANTLR. The major concern is that ANTLR is an LL(*) parser unlike yacc which is LALR. I'm used to thinking bottom-up and I don't exactly know what the advantage of LL grammars is. People say that LL grammars are easier to understand and more popular these days. But it seems that LR parsers are more powerful e.g. LL parsers are incapable of dealing with left-recursions, although there seems to be some workarounds.
So the question is what is the advantage of LL grammars over LALR? I'd appreciate it if somebody could give me some examples. Links to useful articles would be great, too.
Thanks for your help in advance!
(I see this is a great resource: What advantages do LL parsers have over LR parsers?, but it would've been better with some examples.)
Answer
LR parsers are strictly more powerful than LL parsers, and in addition, LALR parsers can run in O(n) like LL parsers. So you won't find any functional advantages of LL over LR.
Thus, the only advantage of LL is that LR state machines are quite a bit more complex and difficult to understand, and LR parsers themselves are not especially intuitive. On the other hand, LL parser code which is automatically generated can be very easy to understand and debug.