Absolutely. Even with no other considerations, you're spending more ALU operations per character in that validation than the naive solution does for parsing. Th

Absolutely. Even with no other considerations, you're spending more ALU operations per character in that validation than the naive solution does for parsing. That probably won't drastically affect latency for a single parse if you don't have branch mispredictions and whatnot, but I'd be shocked if it didn't reduce throughput by 2x even for validation as simple as that.