You're conflating parsing of expressions with operator precedence parsers (aka Pratt parsers). IronCalc uses a recursive descent parser, and Pratt parsers are an optimization of recursive descent parsers. Pratt parsers have one function that implements all precedence levels, while recursive descent parsers have one function per precedence level, but they contain basically the same logic.

Source: 20 years ago I converted GCC's C++ parser from recursive descent to an operator precedence parser; obviously GCC respected precedence even before my work, which was purely an optimization. In fact the code I replaced had the note "The expression parser recurses through the various levels of precedence as specified in the grammar, rather than using an operator-precedence technique".

https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commit/b8b94c5ba81744d325f...