Strings conform to an LL(1) grammar . An LL(1) grammar is a contextfree grammar whose strings can be parsed one character at a time from left to right with at most one character of lookahead. Additionally, LL(1) grammars expand the leftmost non-terminal first. These features make LL(1) grammars such as the one used by Balsa a good fit for manually-written recursive descent parsers. LL(1) grammars can also be used as a basis for auto-generated parsers through packages such as Bison and ANTLR . The full grammar for Balsa strings is available as a text file in this paper's Supporting Material.