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Answer: performance.

Scannerless parser grammars, especially with GLR, are extremely flexible and a pleasure to write. They are the "DWIM" of parsers. But you pay a high price in performance for that flexibility.

Since programming language grammars don't tend to change much, by the time you have a production compiler it's usually worth your time to switch to a split lexer/scanner in order to get that extra performance.



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