AbstractCompiler writing tools, such as parser generators, are‐commonly used to build new operators. Nevertheless, constructing compilers by hand remains common. Such compilers are often built using recursive‐descent parsing for most of the language and operator‐precedence parsing for expressions. This paper describes a simple technique for parsing expressions using recursive descent that avoids the usual proliferation of procedures that occurs when recursive descent is used to parse expressions. By taking advantage of the similarity of the productions describing expressions in most languages, the n + 1 procedures usually required to parse expressions with n precedence levels can be replaced with a table and two procedures.