title: What advantages do LL parsers have over LR parsers?
body: <p>What advantages do LL parsers have over LR parsers to warrant their relative popularity in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_parser_generators" rel="noreferrer">today's parser generator tools</a>?</p>
  
  <p>According to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LR_parser" rel="noreferrer">Wikipedia</a>, LR parsing appears to have advantages over LL:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>LR parsing can handle a larger range of languages than LL parsing, and is also better at error reporting, i.e. it detects syntactic errors when the input does not conform to the grammar as soon as possible. This is in contrast to an LL(k) (or even worse, an LL(*) parser) which may defer error detection to a different branch of the grammar due to backtracking, often making errors harder to localize across disjunctions with long common prefixes.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Note: This is not homework. I was just surprised when I found out that Antlr is an LL parser generator (despite having "LR" in its name!).</p>