Top-Down / Bottom-Up

Top-Down

+

easy to write by hand.

+

flexible embedding in compiler possible.

-

harder to maintain.

-

error recovery can be tricky.

-

deep recursion can be inefficient.

Bottom-Up

+

larger class of languages and grammar.

-

needs tool to generate

-

less flexible to embed in compiler

-

depends on quality of tool

Mixtures are possible. Some commercial compilers use recursive descent, with operator precedence for expressions to get rid of deep recursion.