That's not true. You can have a LL or LR grammar, and use a hand-written parser to get better speed, better error reporting, any number of reasons really. Java is LL(1), but javac seem to use a hand-written recursive descent parser. Now that I think about it, Java being omitted is weird.

> Java is LL(1)...

Java hasn't ever been able to be parsed with one token look ahead, the earlier versions had a section on how to modify the grammar to be LALR(1)[0] but it was dropped in later versions of the specification -- probably due to added features which made it unfeasible like generic classes.

It's actually quite a good resource since they explain the reasons why the parser needs to have more than one token to figure out what's going on.

[0] http://titanium.cs.berkeley.edu/doc/java-langspec-1.0/19.doc...

What’s not true?

I said ‘most’ not ‘all’, and nobody here said the only reason to hand-write a parser was context sensitivity.